Barry Harris, the 77-year-old Detroit pianist, had been under the weather throughout his London shows - so on his closing night, the doctor who had apparently kept him on his feet was in the audience as a guest. "Think of a number from one to eight," Harris asked him and two other members of the audience. He then made a samba out of the notes the three numbers represented on a scale. As gifted a teacher as he is a player, Harris is the most captivating of communicators, even when he can appear to be absorbed as much in a conversation with himself as with his listeners.

Accompanied by bassist Dave Green and drummer Steve Brown, the pianist's touch is infallibly subtle, and it distils a voluminous awareness of all kinds of music ("this is the way Chopin would play a blues," Harris demonstrated), simmered for so long in his consciousness as to be expressed now in clues, hints and insinuations.

On It Could Happen to You, Harris sketched in the theme in broken chords and provocatively hanging phrases, though he would sometimes briefly step up the intensity by playing a scurrying sequence of clustered figures to lead up to the release of a chord change. He started Just One of Those Things as an unaccompanied dream-walk but then accelerated to a gallop, with Brown's cymbal fizz bursting into life. A mid-tempo original emphasised Harris's disinclination to hit any note that does not seem to have a reason for being there, and an amiable calypso turned into a conversation between Brown's economical drum-patterns and Green's smooth-flowing bass. A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square started lyrically, then became an elegant dance, like the score to an Astaire-Rogers routine; and a Latin swinger cruised on Brown's sonorous tom-tom accents. The world is full of great jazz pianists, but when it comes to doing more with less, Harris remains unmissable.