Jean-Michel Pilc, the New York-based French pianist, maintains a cavalier indifference to the whispering, meditative music that characterises a good deal of contemporary jazz. Pilc whacks the keyboard as if settling an old score with it - but beneath the sound and fury an acute musical intelligence is at work, with a formidable classical and jazz technique to match.

For this gig, Pilc was reunited with the explosive drummer Mark Mondesir and accompanied by his clear-toned, rhythmically springy regular bassist Thomas Bramerie. Pilc gets through a lot of music in the course of a performance, so groups of pieces tended to segue into each other, with the elisions sometimes elegant, sometimes thumpingly robust.

On Thelonious Monk's Jackie-ing, Pilc built a taut bass motif into a sustained eruption of jangling trills, headlong double-time and badgering, percussive chords, with Mondesir assisting in a typical Pilc climax in which a repeating piano vamp is made hotter and hotter by a gathering storm of drumming. The pianist's New Dreams began as a romantic rhapsody, veered into free improvising, fell back to delicacy, then turned into Schumann - first played quite straight, then swung. In the ensuing flow came Straight No Chaser (which had even Monk's skewed take on harmony twisted further), Bye Bye Blackbird, God Save the Queen, a little Chick Corea, more Schumann and the Pilc ballad Christmas Night.

Pilc is unerring at taking his listeners to the edge of the jitters, then supplying the antidote with a softly stroked reflective passage or an invitation to one of Blamerie's graceful bass reveries. In a world teeming with unplugged jazz piano trios, Jean-Michel Pilc belongs right in the front row.