If you hear a young musician playing a harmonically ambiguous, talkative kind of contemporary jazz, which doesn't robotically press the usual tension-and-release buttons or sound like it was aimed at a playlist, there's a fair bet that the inspiration came from Steve Coleman.

Coleman is the 44-year-old Chicago alto player and Berkeley academic who, in the 1980s, introduced the term "M-Base" to throw a loose net around the complex new fusion music he was making with Cassandra Wilson, Dave Gilmore, Dave Holland and others.

At the Queen Elizabeth Hall Coleman played a new work, which combined heavy-hitting funk, vivacious jazzy melody, a few quotes from Thelonious Monk and some exhilaratingly robust ensemble ducking and diving with the leader's meticulously steady, bravura-less melody line.

An unorthodox line-up of brass, keyboards, percussion and a classical woodwind quartet supplied the variety of texture. Coleman's full, resonant sound on alto issued an opening call, echoed by Ambrose Akinmusire's trumpet, before the leader swept into a long, Byzantine improvisation over a free-funk pulse.

The music shifted seamlessly in intensity and idioms throughout the set. A Latin feel progressively intervened, with trumpeters Jonathan Finlayson (astonishing) and Ralph Alessi demonstrating scalding power and shapely restraint respectively.Staccato riffs like drum rudiments led to Coleman's sublime alto sound gliding through a whispering undergrowth of intertwining flute, bassoon and trombone lines. The work then veered into a passage that combined straight four-four time with an undercurrent of funk and an ensemble of car-horn riffing, all climaxing with a Monk theme. And Coleman indicated that his rhapsodic side isn't cramped by these structural complexities, delivering an exquisite, standards-shaped ballad late in the set. Better than Coleman's records, this was contemporary music in the fullest sense.