When Uri Caine, the flintily poetic American pianist, visited Britain before Christmas, I maintained he now belonged among today's hottest jazz pianists, along with Brad Mehldau, the Scandinavians Bobo Stenson and Esbjorn Svensson, Keith Jarrett and the Balkans whirlwind Bojan Z.

That was before the Englishman John Taylor began his 60th birthday tour. His opening London performance was an unarguable reminder that he is a also world-class player whose vision is still expanding.

Taylor writes a restlessly complex classical-influenced music for improvisers. His Green Man suite turned on the lyrical clarinet and soprano-sax conversations of the Creative Jazz Orchestra's Ian Dixon and Julian Arguelles, the acoustic guitar of Frenchman David Chevalier and the extraordinary euphonium eloquence of Oren Marshall. But in the second half, Taylor swept all before him with a new, superb trio.

The Green Man Suite moved through jazzy spikiness and rhythmic channel-hopping, glistening romantic-classical fragility and piquant autumnal reveries, climactic harmonies reminiscent of Michael Gibbs, a brief burst of free-blasting and a spooky walking riff with gliding brass and reed chords soaring over it.

Then came Taylor's superb trio with bassist Marc Johnson (a former Bill Evans sideman) and drummer Joey Baron. Baron is one of the most swinging and melodic of arrhythmic and free-inclined drummers. Johnson's playing has delicacy, grace and speed, and avoids the strained sound that is often produced in the upper register. Taylor's Bill Evans antecedents often glimmered through. But his personal mix of percussiveness, lyricism and ability to park a solo on a dime for his partners to jump aboard were breathtaking on the intricate, uptempo Pure and Simple (it wasn't), and poignantly spacey on Between Moons. At times Baron's playing was sympathetically minimalist, using just a soft mallet and a brush. But he brought the art of the drum solo into his own dimension with a polyrhythmic hand-percussion break near the close. Kenny Wheeler's Everybody's Song But My Own, meanwhile, brought the bass solo of the night from Johnson.

· At Unity Theatre, Liverpool (0151-709 4988), tonight, then touring to Birmingham, Basingstoke and Sheffield.