It doesn't seem to matter how often his admirers mention the Swedish pianist Bobo Stenson in the same breath as Keith Jarrett or Brad Mehldau; the latter can still fill the Festival Hall, while Stenson struggles to pack the Purcell Room. But Stenson remains one of the most sophisticated and rewarding jazz pianists on the planet, even in a jazz age containing so many remarkable ones. He is touring the UK with a thrilling trio, featuring regular bassist Anders Jormin and young drummer Jan Falt.

Falt is the creative wild card in the Swedish threesome. Jormin is intonationally near-perfect, has a low-end roar like an alpine horn, can play swerving microtonal runs that suggest a sitar, and is as gracefully conversational as any bassist in Europe. Falt, on the other hand, exhibits a mixture of a similarly conversational drum style (Paul Motian's) and the confrontational, improv-influenced manner of younger small-group percussionists such as the Bad Plus's David King, the Norwegian Paal Nilssen-Love or the Americans Jim Black and Tom Rainey. Falt is as likely to greet a diaphanous piano shimmer with a head-butting bass-drum thump as a flutter on the cymbals, and the effect is distinctly bracing.

Across two rivetting sets, a Jormin ballad featured the bassist gradually shifting a softly humming solo into a stealthily descending chord-melody, an Astor Piazzolla piece brought a beautifully weighted improvisation from Stenson, and a fast Ornette Coleman theme had Falt spinning a cymbal in the air, catching and whacking it in one movement, before ratcheting up the careering pulse with jittery free-cymbal patterns and arrhythmically slamming tom-tom beats. Charles Ives' Serenity was a vehicle for Jormin in sitar mode, and Tony Williams' Now's the Time shared its bass riff between the piano and bass. Stenson took advantage of the venue to play Henry Purcell's Music for a While, and Coleman's flying Race Face confirmed how dynamically this new Stenson trio interact, mingling precision, freedom, scalding energy and contemplation.

· At the Holywell Music Room, Oxford, tonight. Box office: 01865 305305