Everything about Harvey Wainapel, the pure-toned American saxophonist, is fastidious. His sound, on tenor or soprano, exhibits hardly any of the bell-note honks, grainy harmonics or white-knuckle helldriving of post-Coltrane sax playing. It often takes on the warmer, fruitier sound of the clarinet (which he also plays) or even the smoothness of articulation of a viola.

A neat, dapper, bespectacled man, Wainapel also likes the smallest element of a performance, from a single note to the namecheck for his sidemen, to be given its proper weight. The gifted young British drummer Seb Rochford was solemnly introduced as "Sebastian", and Wainapel carefully told the audience that his name is pronounced "wine-apple".

Considering that this reviewer, with a head full of the sad death of the drummer Billy Higgins last weekend, is composing this piece in a hair shirt for attaching Higgins's name to the feverishly alive Billy Jenkins in yesterday's Cheltenham festival round-up, Wainapel's care in these matters seems like a better lesson than usual. But it is also a reflection of a particular kind of detailed, patient lyricism in jazz improvisation that's rare among today's performers. Wainapel played with a variety of mainstream-to-soft-bop pieces from his recent CDs The Hang and Ambrosia. And even though the music was often as quiet as a whisper, his class was always audible.

Wainapel transforms the sometimes anguished sound of the soprano saxophone to a honey-smooth purr. Rochford confirmed his growing reputation with a soft, pattering, subtly appropriate accompaniment on brushes. In Latin mode (Wainapel likes bossa novas, but plays them as if they were ballads), the music remained a careful unfurling of tone and nuance rather than an invitation to dance. This is reserved, urbane, orthodox, supper-club jazz - but high in the premier league for all that.