Double-bass players can sometimes seem both lugubrious and dogged, as if they were simultaneously challenged by and phlegmatic about their instrument's struggle to stand out amid the buzz and hum of the world. But Chris Minh Doky, the half-Danish, half-Vietnamese bass virtuoso who lives in New York, has no such ambivalence about his darkly rumbling instrument. Minh Doky leans devotedly around the bass as if it were his svelte and glamorous other half. He races over its fat strings and long fingerboard as if it were a cello, producing a remarkably light, singing sound. It is often observed that his approach is simultaneously that of an acoustic bassist and a bass guitarist.

Now he is launching a new album for Blue Note called Cinematique, a repertoire of famous movie scores. The bassist has a profound affection for songs, and an elegant lyricism informs even his most extended improvisations.

But his jazz sensibilities and the presence of such high-class improvising partners as Makoto Ozone on piano and Jeff "Tain" Watts, Branford Marsalis's phenomenal drummer, ensure that this is no cursory budget-album cruise through Hollywood's greatest hits.

At the Pizza Express Jazz Club, Watts's drumming - a Niagara Falls of freely scattered but rhythmically rock-solid snare and tom accents, cymbal cascades and off-centre patterns - was the elemental force driving the band, threatening to wash all other considerations away. A wry account of the James Bond theme and Watts's own composition The Impaler both climaxed on drum solos that flung listeners against the walls.

But elsewhere, the drummer sensitively fuelled the endeavours of the whole ensemble, and he frequently instigated a fruitful give-and-take with Ozone, who seemed to be hugely enjoying the stimulation. The mid-tempo Nothing to Lose found Minh Doky at his most lithe in the unfolding of effortless bass melody. The Pat Metheny feel was accentuated by Ozone's echoes of Lyle Mays in the breezy sway of the piano figures.

Watts and Ozone baited each other engagingly in a funky mid-tempo episode over a repeating bass vamp, and the quirky Lazy Uncle (the result of a former Ozone partnership with John Scofield) sounded attractively like a John Lewis tune for the Modern Jazz Quartet. On the ballad One Day I'll Fly Away, meanwhile, the leader brought to his beautiful solo a percussive buzz worthy of flamenco guitar, as well as a silvery melodic gleam.