Late starters are not common in jazz, but Judy Lewis, the Israel-based American former classical pianist, was 31 before she heard her first jazz concert - and made a career switch. Now she's on her first tour of the UK, with an Israeli trio travelling under the falsely forbidding title of Phoenix Over Manhattan Acoustic.

Like Sweden's Esbjorn Svensson, Lewis has come to jazz by a back route (Svensson's path was via English rock music), and consequently doesn't play in the way a Hancock, Tyner, Jarrett or Mehldau might do if leading a contemporary acoustic jazz group. Now a prolific composer, she has developed a tightly arranged, primarily ensemble-based music, with improvised solos developing within a tumult of accompanying voices and staying close to repeating hooks, another Svensson link.

The pieces often open as rhapsodic, romantic-classical piano overtures, and turn into punchy grooves bustling with recurring themes - and the electric bass-and-drums partnership of Dolev Solomon and Udi Shlomo maintains a fierce urgency that fuels much of the group's drive.

Lewis elegantly deployed contrasts between delicate reflection and vivacious Middle-Eastern dance patterns, switching abruptly into crackling funk. She even reinvented Jerome Kern's Yesterdays, and intensified the furore of jostling interlocking themes on her own Voices, with Tal Gur's soprano saxophone threading through it.

Gur complemented the ensemble well enough, although his lines rarely departed much from the post-Coltrane whoopy-soprano repertoire. This may be a group stretched a little uneasily between the search for rock thrills and jazz surprises, but it's no clone of anybody else, even Esbjorn Svensson.

· At Lauderdale House, Highgate Hill, London, on Thursday. Box office: 07941 866 555. Then touring.