The annual visit of Brazil's most celebrated musical couple has become a small tropical oasis in the midst of the bleak northern European winter. As temperatures plummeted outside, the Moreira band stoked up some equatorial heat with their open-ended interplay of polyrhythms and fusions, travelling from rainforest to urban jungle.
Were Airto a name-dropping kind of guy, he could bore everybody for hours with yarns about how he played with Miles Davis, Weather Report, Santana and Paul Simon. He could reasonably claim to be one of a handful of musicians who has helped to establish percussion as a specialist field in its own right. As it is, he prefers to exert a discreet shaping influence from behind a drumkit or a set of congas, as his band throw some ingredients together and follow the ensuing chain reactions wherever they lead.
Their music is a potted history of Airto's progress from comparatively formal modern jazz (of which there was a reminder from tonight's support act, tenor saxophonist Stan Robinson) to a kind of polyglot experimentalism.
They opened with a sleek dissertation in latin-jazz fusion, the bassist whizzing around his six-stringed instrument with intimidating technical accomplishment, but then the music grew steadily looser.
Flora Purim stepped to the microphone for Crazy Love, singing the lyrics before moving smartly aside as the next stampede of cross-rhythms and slippery chord changes came charging through. The addition of Airto and Flora's daughter Deanna and members of her band Eyedentity offers fresh possibilities, including episodes of three-part harmony rap accompanied by popping, spluttering human beatbox noises. Eventually, Airto couldn't resist a taste of the limelight, and the band sauntered off to leave him alone armed with a tambourine. He began by muttering in Portuguese, worked his way through a sequence of wailing incantations, growling noises and falsetto squawks, and ended up banging out syncopations and blowing a whistle as though carnival had come to Soho. "We're here for three weeks, so things are gonna get much better," he promised.
· Until February 12. Box office: 020-7439 0947.
