Jason Yarde, the London saxophonist and composer, has taken some giant leaps since he first started showing up at Jazz Warriors rehearsals while still in his school uniform. But as his reputation as an innovative contemporary composer has grown, Yarde's qualities as a saxophone improviser have been slightly eclipsed, particularly since he adopts a modest solo role in his own bigger groups.

Saturday's Jazz On a Spring Day programme addressed that omission, presenting Yarde in a trio with bassist Larry Bartley and drummer Mike Pickering, with an appearance from former J-Life vocal partner Julie Dexter.

When his soloing has more elbow room, it's fascinating to witness how seamlessly Yarde's writing and improvising intertwine. Like Steve Coleman and Greg Osby, he favours repeating melodic figures as triggers to improvisation. But because his saxophone technique runs all the way from funk to Evan Parker's abstract sound patterns, and he has a very fertile conventional melody imagination, a great deal of variety springs from these simple beginnings.

Yarde followed a rhythmically hypnotic opener with a slow theme like a pop ballad that quickened into swing against Bartley's loping counter-melodies, and his playing began to resemble Ornette Coleman's, with his hanging-in-space resolutions.

Few concessions to the spring-afternoon, foyer-gig casualness of the occasion were made in a fierce, wailing, Coltrane-like multiphonics exercise over Pickering's balefully rolling drums, though a lighter, if less eventful, lyricism returned with Dexter's arrival on an old J-Life voice-and-sax unison theme, Some Other Time.

Night and Day sounded a little arbitrarily stuck on top of the lively ensemble exploration it turned into, but Yarde resourcefully maintained a long alto solo, sometimes bumping staccato figures off the drums, sometimes cruising gracefully, warmly voicelike with Dexter on an impromptu ostinato over the drum finale.