Jed Williams would have creased his distinctive half-smile at the predominantly Welsh composition of the Steve Waterman Orchestra on its Cardiff gig in his memory this week.

Williams was the visionary who masterminded Brecon's ambitious jazz festival, and thus put Wales on the world jazz map. Williams booked the then unknown Waterman band for the last Brecon Festival he directed before his sudden death in 2003.

Since then Waterman (a powerful trumpet virtuoso and composer) has steadily grown an independent identity for his orchestra, which often joins a harmonically canny, melodically hip, hard-bop manner to a more fluid and ambiguous musical world.

The Waterman band was preceded by recently risen star Gwilym Simcock's piano trio. Simcock has rocketed through jazz education and out into a creative world of his own almost overnight. In a varied set, he included a typically flowing tribute to his teacher John Taylor's harmonically demanding Ambleside Days. But it was a fast exploration of a standard (How Deep Is the Ocean) that cried out for a recording machine to be running, in its headlong momentum, occasional classical flourishes, and melodic queries resolved or left quizzically suspended in space.

The orchestra then swept through a bold programme, from the bright brass sound and heated theme of Concerto for Congas (with kitdrummer Richard Newby creditablymimicking the conga part), the diaphanous Gil Evans-like harmonies of John Warren's arrangement of the sidestepping Waterman theme Out of Touch, a Latin feature sparking one of several rugged sax solos from the excellent Russell van den Berg, and the rousing brass-band-to-soul feel of October Arrival - dedicated to Waterman's father and to Jed Williams. The trumpeter himself delivered a stream of vivid improvisations - at one point even a circular-breathing episode that both defied respiration and maintained a taut melodic logic. The band steered through Waterman's complex music with a casually expert aplomb.