Cuban pianist Chucho Valdés and the latest incarnation of Irakere - the band that put Cuban jazz on the world map long before the Buena Vistas - have started a three-week London season. As they sometimes played on their opening night as if they had just met, the extended stay may be just as well.

The sidemen mixed explosive virtuosity with hot licks, tentativeness and decisiveness, thoughtfulness and bluster. Valdés's playing, however, was breathtaking - as powerful, unpredictable and incandescent as McCoy Tyner's.

Performing opposite a compact, local, hard-boppish quartet led by drummer Clark Tracey, Irakere opened with a classically accent-packed Cuban-jazz groover. The horn and guitar solos emitted heat without much light until the entry of Valdés, quoting from Old Man River, who then unleashed runs that rippled the length of the keyboard, veering into bop classics, descending into rumbling bass-note harangues, leaping into sustained, Tyner-like trills, while his left hand marched dark chords back and forth.

Young trumpeter Mayquel Gonzalez played My Funny Valentine in a shuffling danson style, swelling into bright double-time figures. But it was on a Latin-funk groover reminiscent of Watermelon Man that he sounded most at home. Alto saxophonist Cesar Lopez showed, in an unaccompanied passage, that his David Sanborn-like sound had depth and an unexpectedly impassioned looseness.

A version of Coltrane's Giant Steps was, more than anything, a reminder of how well Coltrane had hidden the joins - though Valdés imperiously did it in a torrent of swing, bop, Cecil Taylorish freedom and stride piano combined. Singer Mayra Valdés pushed an uptempo salsa charge from operatic declamation to dazzling, gabbling, abstract scat. A work in progress at the moment perhaps, but with a couple of days' adjustment, it'll be a work in progress in the best sense.

· Until June 26. Box office: 020-7439 0747.