It isn’t hard to hear why Chick Corea, one of jazz’s most imaginative melodists, admires British reeds player Tim Garland. Like Corea, Garland writes instrumentals that sound like songs or dances, and treats composing and improvising as indivisible. The Englishman also throws in familiarity with Celtic folk traditions, classical and world music. He touched most of those bases with his new quartet – featuring the former Sting and Jeff Beck pianist Jason Rebello – at Kings Place, in London, on a tour to promote their current album, One.

Garland’s folk roots, beautiful tone, and the deft empathy he has with Rebello all shone through the opening Bright New Year, and stayed delicately luminous despite the electronic atmospherics of the more Weather Report-like Colours of the Night, with Rebello switching to Fender Rhodes, versatile guitarist Ant Law mimicking a bassline, and subtle world-percussionist Asaf Sirkis veering into classical-Indian polyrhythmic scat. Garland saved the springy and unadorned Latin melody of Corea’s Windows to the end of a treatment that had begun with his bugged bass clarinet resembling an accordion, but his eloquence as an acoustic player was highlighted on a tenor-sax evocation of the mist and distant ships of his Tyneside home, and a quiet soprano salutation to his daughter. Sirkis took off on the climactic vamp of the whippily funky Foretold and Law sounded violin-like in the tenor/guitar acrobatics of the jazz-rockish Prototype – a thrilling crowd-rouser Garland should probably have kept for his encore, rather than the more intricately noodly farewell, Yes to This.

• At Swanage jazz festival on 9 July. At Manchester jazz festival on 24 July.