The life of a jazz musician is a flighty one. Stable band line-ups are rare, and even the most successful partnerships have a tendency to dissolve as the practicalities of finding bigger and better gigs come to bear. That's why it is always a treat to hear pianist Jonathan Gee, drummer Winston Clifford and bassist Steve Rose, three British musicians who have stuck together for several years, and who have developed a near-telepathic relationship.

In Nottingham the trio set up in their usual way - Gee and Clifford on either side of Rose - and although the bassist provided the most swinging support, the pianist and drummer seemed to have eyes only for each other. For them, musical compositions are delicate playthings, to be explored, taken apart and put back together with consummate precision.

The trio played music by Thelonious Monk, Chick Corea and Jerome Kern, as well as several Gee originals. They performed quietly and carefully, with an understated grace reminiscent of the Bill Evans trio. Clifford's use of brushes and his technique of delicately tapping his drums with his fingers frequently brought the group to the edge of silence, and torrential cascades of piano notes were delivered with all the force of falling snowflakes.

Gee comes from the Teddy Wilson school of debonair piano playing, but his obvious fondness for Monk added a pleasing spikiness. His own music was full of sunshine and colour, studded with fragments of melody that refused to be pinned down. During a tune called Tortitillo he used passages of tense harmonic suspensions to tease and test frisky little riffs, never taking his eyes off Clifford for fear of missing a spark of rhythmical inspiration. Clifford, in turn, never failed to oblige, superimposing apparently incompatible metres on top of each other while occasionally indulging in a burst of feather-light scat singing. An effortless breeze of a performance by three musicians who have learned to play as one.