Graham Collier began this rare UK comeback concert with a double-take. His orchestra seemed to have roared into life, old associate Harry Beckett skipping and chuckling his way through a typical trumpet dance - and then the penny dropped: the players were sitting as still as statues. Beckett was just grinning at the sound of his own idiosyncrasies, and Collier was looking quizzically out into the crowd.

The music was a 1967 recording of Collier's Aberdeen Angus. It opened a retrospective on a remarkable 40-year career, one that has included such landmarks as being the first British graduate of the Berklee School of Music, professor at the Royal Academy and director of the workshop band that led to the legendary Loose Tubes.

Collier is a composer who puts the creativity of his soloists first. Here at the Purcell Room, the writing was arrayed in compact clusters with acres of space in between for the soloists to weave intricate countermelodies. The finale, a new Birmingham Jazz commission called The Vonetta Factor, represented the process at its most rigorous.

The show visited Collier works 30 years apart, following Aberdeen Angus with pieces from 1995's The Third Colour. This ran from free-collective thrashes, past a trombone soloing against a tuba and out into swing with a slurred blues for Ed Speight's guitar. The Vonetta Factor contrasted a brooding drum tattoo, a brain-jangling burst of electronics from keyboardist Roger Dean and imaginative breaks from trumpeters Steve Waterman and Harry Beckett, trombonists Mark Bassey and Fayyaz Virji, and reed players Art Themen, Chris Biscoe and James Allsopp. The jostling lines that Collier's music intertwines got tangled at times, but the reasons he has been such a force in British jazz were clear enough.

· The London jazz festival continues at various venues until Sunday. Details: www.serious.org.uk