For the next 10 days, in the London Jazz Festival's 10th year, the South Bank halls - and many other venues around the city - have turned themselves over to jazz.

The overture was delivered by the British musician, Gerard Presencer, playing on the Festival Hall's jazz Freestage. Presencer, a professor at the Royal Academy, was in some ways an appropriate actor for this festival's prologue: subtle, expert, imaginative, and representative of a warmer high-art embrace of jazz.

Yet his music often sounded eerily as if he was in a parallel universe to the dancefloor idiom he likes, his band clattering away on stubborn pulses while he floated diaphanously around them.

At the Dean Street Pizza Express, Mike and Kate Westbrook and the versatile and imaginative saxophonist, Chris Biscoe, were playing the music from their multilingual travelogue L'Ascenseur (The Lift). The Westbrooks visited oompah traditional street-jazz, free-improvisation, bleak 1930s-Berlin cabaret sounds and north African shimmerings.

But the barnstorming Esbjorn Svensson Trio from Sweden covered all the bases in one at the Festival Hall: infectious grooves, memorable original tunes, spontaneous ensemble understanding, dramatic extremes of dynamics and a talent for playing its cards slowly, constantly generating expectation.

Seven Days of Falling turned a ticking pulse and repeating bass vamp into a whirl of sound over Dan Berglund's high, cello-like bowed bass, and Rube Thing featured long, bluesy grooves and occasional Thelonious Monk piano figures. Berglund ripped into his Hendrix-mimicking bugged-bass effects in a Pat Metheny-like piece, and Svensson then drifted into a rhapsodic ballad mood that recalled the Bill Evans of Blue In Green.

Fresh and contemporary music, but with a rich sense of history.

· Until November 23. Details: www.serious.org.uk