The London jazz festival's organisers reported almost 100% full houses for their big-venue concerts last week, all the way from superstar Herbie Hancock, to a dissonant improv performance by saxophonist Evan Parker. Jazz is in the air, it seems, and everyone's out and about inhaling it.

At a sold-out Barbican on Saturday, bass and composing star Dave Holland opened with a chamber-jazzy set featuring trumpeter Kenny Wheeler and 75-year-old jazz guitar legend Jim Hall. Hall was a shade hesitant on Wheeler's wistful Everybody's Song But My Own, but his 16-bar blues Careful ("You have to be careful it doesn't turn into a 12-bar blues") induced a delectable guitar break of choppy accents and fluid melodic whispers, a typical Wheeler solo of soft squeals and circuitous resolutions.

Pianist Jason Moran soon galvanised the second set with a piano eruption of hammering chords and molten runs after the out-of-phase polyphonies of the opener, Prime Directive. The formidable Chris Potter accelerated from sax-exercise repeats to banshee Coltranesque wails on trombonist Robin Eubanks' Full Circle, and then sounded as if he were duetting with himself on the climactic Lucky Seven. The set was a near-perfect balance of classically ambitious ensemble writing and flat-out improv.

At the South Bank, young Scottish guitarist Graeme Stephen's set was a less subtle, but more eclectic mix of contemporary jazz, funk and Scottish folk. The most elegant, if low-key, music came from trumpeter Neil Yates' band (Yates splices Miles Davis's vocalised sounds and Celtic folk inflections), and the most straightahead jazz swing from 18 year-old vibraphone prodigy Lewis Wright. If anyone can crack the inscrutable vibraphone's emotions, Wright will.