Gary Husband, the Level 42 drummer with a double life as a very creative jazz pianist and composer, has turned up with a stunning group venture after a long silence - a characteristic that's getting to be his identifying mark. He played the Vortex as a solo pianist, and the second half as the hurricane drum force in his new Drive quartet.

The first set's solo piano music testified to Husband's improvisational audacity, technique and arranger's touch. The anthemic Mahavishnu Orchestra theme Meeting of the Spirits became a stream of stabbed, drumlike piano chords and impulsive melody bursts, strongly echoing John McLaughlin's guitar approach. The zig-zagging melody of Celestial Terrestrial Commuters (McLaughlin originally wrote it in the late 60s as a jazzy theme with John Surman, under the less psychedelic title Binky's Beam) unleashed an improvisational flood, and Allan Holdsworth's Devil Take the Hindmost came close to free improv.

But the Drive quartet blew the lid off, not least because Husband's drumming was such an astonishing mixture of rhythmic fluidity and raw power, recalling a cross between Miles Davis percussionist the late Tony Williams and a stadium fusion star like Dave Weckl. Saxophonist Julian Siegel had an Ornette Coleman-like lateral waywardness, and Wayne Shorter's ethereal qualities in the opener (strongly reminiscent of the great mid-60s Miles group) and young trumpeter Richard Turner indicated big promise and a distinctive rhythmic imagination after a tentative start. Siegel's Ten Four was a riffy horn melody stretched by all the members (bassist Mike Janisch sustained both a big sound and a fierce pulse), Angels Over City Square was a delicate, wide-interval ballad with Husband reverting to piano, and Ellington's Take the Coltrane rocketed through the modulations at warp speed. This is a band we'll be hearing a lot more from.