Playing piano for the BBC Big Band might typecast you as a swinger who turns few unplanned corners, but that would be unfair both to that increasingly loose-limbed ensemble and the irrepressible Geoff Eales, who occupies its piano chair. Eales was launching a solo album and exploring an impromptu duet relationship with Michael Garrick - an influential older-generation British pianist recently reprofiled through DJ Gilles Peterson's Impressed albums - at St Cyprian's church, near Baker Street.

This new fortnightly gig has been set up to catch listeners on their way home, who don't generally get to jazz clubs at midnight - but if Eales or Garrick were disoriented by the earliness of the hour, it didn't hamper their inclination to play as if time were pressing. Garrick, a sophisticated composer who plays piano with a composer's selectiveness, was the more spare and succinct of the two. Eales, an admirer of Keith Jarrett, with a formidable technique whose lyrical sense doesn't break down at high speeds, was the more imperious and dramatic - though the intensity of much of his playing had more of a struggle with the acoustics of the church.

Eales echoed the chiming, silvery, songlike sound and low-note thunder of the Jarrett of Koln Concert vintage on an ecstatic hymn-like piece, and he and Garrick together generated a wild, rolling swing scattered with call-and-response exchanges on Herbie Hancock's Dolphin Dance. A Garrick original, Prayer, found the composer exploring soft, slowly shifting harmonies, interrupted by a feverish, silent-movie-score ragtime feel. The two then came together again for Jarrett's My Song, a mix of feathery melody lines and pumping left-hand vamps. Garrick threw quotes from The Entertainer and Rustle of Spring into a flying duet on a Charlie Parker theme, and an initially pensive and then swinging Autumn Leaves found both men giving the ambience of the space more time to absorb the music. Graceful piano jazz, from compellingly contrasting performers.