Dylan Howe, drummer with the late Ian Dury's Blockheads, son of guitarist Steve Howe and a young man with a long list of pop and rock session credentials, is out on the jazz road - driving a classic hard-bop, small-band repertoire.

Like that most famous elder-statesman of jazz-loving rock drummers Charlie Watts, Howe is a truant from very loud music who plays his hobby surprisingly discreetly. In the National Theatre's foyer, where the amplification is kept low, Howe's two-horn frontline played without microphones, so the group sounded rather restrained and genteel.

But although Howe moves with an angular, stabbing suddenness - as if all his muscles were rigid - rather than straight-ahead jazz's more familiar lazy lope, the approach was visual and not aural. The group handled a warm, elegantly harmonised repertoire of classics and originals with the balance of fireworks and languid soulfulness that characterises the original idiom.

The two horn players - Quentin Collins on trumpet and Brian Edwards on alto sax - did much to bring that about, with Collins bringing a bright, crisply articulated Lee Morgan-like intensity to the proceedings, while Edwards offered a slowly unfolding, hollow-toned deliberation.

A slow piece with something of Round Midnight's melodic shape brought a soft, brassy lyricism from Collins, while Andrew McCormack's piano and Larry Bartley's flowing bass lines wrapped themselves sympathetically around Howe's deft brushwork.

The drummer snapped into more exclamatory mode on a typical hard-bop vehicle that insinuated its low-register theme almost offhandedly before bringing it to a slamming crescendo.

In a venue with punchier sound and fewer passers-by, this sparky band will undoubtedly warm straightahead fans' hearts.

· At the Crooked Billet, Henley, tonight. Box office: 01491 681048. Then touring.