Wolfgang Muthspiel, the brilliant Austrian jazz guitarist, has an original called Mehldau on his new album. It's not an unexpected connection. Like American piano star Brad Mehldau, Muthspiel is the kind of comprehensively resourceful improviser who can head off in directions that might seem mystifying at first - but he's so much at ease in his personal musical firmament that you know it will be fine to go along.

Muthspiel is now road-testing a new all-Austrian trio, with twin brothers Mathias and Andreas Pichler on bass and drums. The Pichler twins let Muthspiel take the lead with less peremptory pushing and challenging than the dynamic previous drummer Brian Blade did, but the group offers a different and more integrated feel.

On the opening After 6 (a rising three-note melodic motif distributed among irregular silences and dark, shimmery chords) Muthspiel got into his formidable stride in a long solo of clipped and fragmented figures, headlong runs bumping into dead-end chords, growling rock-guitar low notes or yodelly treble sounds.

Etude Number Two began as a solo feature, played on an instrument with a folksier timbre, eventually accelerating into rolling fingered chords and zither-like clangs over Andreas Pichler's discreet brushwork. As with Brad Mehldau, Muthspiel's improvisations seem to laterally grow (as if alternative options continually tug at him) rather than take a conventionally jazzy linear course.

Muthspiel did provide plenty of fast-moving and melodically twisting postbop variety, however, some of it recalling the fluency of Pat Metheny at his jazziest. But it was the second half's Dhafer (a tribute to Tunisian oud-player Dhafer Youssef) that confirmed the Austrian's widening horizons - sparingly using loops and repeats, a little ethereal chanting, rich percussion tapestry, and some of the most creatively loose guitar improvising of the evening. A major talent moving into a new phase.

· At the New Vortex, London N16, tonight. Box office: 020-7254 4097.