Balancing between freedom and order is jazz music's recurring challenge. The-Quartet (the hyphen is intentional, but is the only irritating thing about them) has spectacularly risen to it. The group's central partnership is the pairing of the guitarist, producer and movie-score composer Jack Hues and the classically trained pianist Sam Bailey, both of whom have long CVs off the UK jazz circuit. They launched a sophisticated debut CD, Illuminated, with a memorable London show.

If The-Quartet sounds as if they would be a composers' band with a little jazz-blowing embroidery added as exotica, the excellent tenor saxophonist Paul Booth ensures that a turbulent Coltrane-esque passion is central to its sound. The bass and drums of Tom Mason and Dave Smith - not Quartet regulars, but so spiritedly inside the music as to sound like founders - kept up the heat, and the spontaneous collective energy was just as powerful as the writing.

The group's horizons stretch from impressionistic pieces such as Hues' Fallujah - which moved from spooky Terje Rypdal-like guitar electronics and arco bass to bumpy free-rhythms and smoky sax - to flat-out post-bop sprints with ingenious melodic twists like in the flying finale, Nervous. A taut guitar hook echoed by Booth's tenor wound up the first set, and the belligerent drumming of Dave Smith (a real discovery) and Booth's whooping, loop-like phrases swapped the band's theme-based identity for a thrilling collective jam.

Wah-wah guitar, a delicate trace of piano and a soft Latin feel propelled Brahms Blues; Hues' and Bailey's fondness for splicing busy clusters of notes into rhythmic spaces that seem too tight for them often drove the group to a cliffhanging intensity. The violinist Raven Bush guested near the end, adding a vividness reminiscent of the early Mahavishnu Orchestra.