Kenny Garrett, Miles Davis's principal saxophonist for the last five years of his life, is a superlative musician. Here he let the audience have it between the eyes with a virtually seamless series of saxophone soliloquies from the off, ending up with catchy jazz-funk and the audience clapping and singing the hooks. It was one of the boldest fusions of pop-jazz and fierce, outer-limits group improvisation to have been heard in Ronnie Scott's in a long time.
Garrett is here with an eager young band of newcomers, playing opposite Irish jazz singer Christine Tobin, who has recently restyled her music from a busy semi-straightahead jazz to a Cassandra Wilson-like guitar and percussion- dominated minimalism. Tobin's reflective music was in danger of becoming a leaf in a storm once the tornado of Garrett's set blew in. Yet the singer affectingly toyed with poignantly personal takes on the Beach Boys' God Only Knows and Bessie Smith's Young Woman Blues. She and guitarist Phil Robson, bassist Dave Whitford and percussionist Thebe Lipere received an enthusiastic welcome.
Garrett's quartet then exploded into XYZ, the leader's brittle, but remarkably voice-like alto sound, soaring over the racing drumming of young percussion phenomenon Ronald Bruner. For 15 minutes, these vehement outpourings continued without pause, making fertile use of a favourite Garrett device: the repetition of a mantra-like resolving phrase and running into it from different melodic directions. Pianist Vernell Brown finally took over with McCoy Tyner-like chordal ascents and belling trills, before the band switched into Garrett's more straightahead Tyner tribute, Chief Blackwater. Brown played a gripping solo of low runs left hanging on the edges of implied endings, and the heat simmered down to a lyrical dreamwalk with Garrett adopting a saxophone sound uncannily like Davis's muted trumpet. Winding up with the funk of Garrett's Happy People gave the hour a satisfying sense of shapely design that had all but turned a succession of pieces into a single suite.
· Until Saturday. Box office: 020-7439 0747.
