Zoe Rahman, a young, animated British pianist with a pigtail that threatens to get under her feet, is the perfect antidote to the fashionable view of the major labels that young people want cross-over, not straight-ahead, jazz. Rahman, who won the Perrier Young Jazz Musician of the Year award a couple of years ago, is a hugely promising musician of powerful technique, group sympathy and compositional skill, but for much of the time she's as straight-ahead as they come. The Central Bar in London's Old Street is the perfect intimate room in which to hear an inventive piano trio, except in one respect - it doesn't have a piano. Rahman had to use an electric keyboard, which detracts from her subtlety of nuance and dynamic control. But if her own considerable contribution wasn't ideally displayed, her group's collective expressiveness was consistently absorbing. Jeremy Brown is a quick, soft-toned, melodically original bassist, and Winston Clifford is one of the UK's most interesting small-group drummers - an ideal complement to any pianist. On Joe Henderson's Isotope (the leader apologising that the piece had to double as the sound-check), Rahman was still settling in.

She often fell back on a favourite device, the percussively repeated single note against shifting chords - though Clifford's brushwork was like a constant, encouraging whisper in her ear. The original ballad Never Enough evolved into an entrancing dialogue with Clifford's hand-drumming, and a Danilo Perez Latin arrangement of Thelonious Monk's Bright Mississippi found Rahman's phrasing increasingly assured, crisply expressed and balancing spare lines against dancing Latin-jazz chording. The up-tempo original Apple Pie filled the small space with its emphatically rolling, McCoy Tyner-like theme, and a haunting How Long Has This Been Going On confirmed that Rahman's youth and ebullient swing are no obstacles to patient, meditative harmonic exploration. Rahman tours the north with this trio next month, so watch out for her.