When the jazz guitarist John Scofield got together with the avant-funk jam-band Medeski, Martin and Wood, he was a star guest being temporarily bolted on to an already successful trio. More than a decade and three albums later, Scofield sounds more and more like a cornerstone of this hooky, hard-grooving, but adventurously uncliched group.

The show was opened by the electronic rhythm-trance quartet the Bays. Some of the fans waiting for Scofield were shaken out of the hall by the Bays' pounding rhythms, thunderous bass sounds and squeak-and-bleep keyboard variations; but drummer Andy Gangadeen never flinched from the beat.

After the interval, catchy, hook-rooted tunes like Hottentot and A Go Go explored the resourcefulness of both Scofield's sound-effects (from bottleneck to phrase-repeating pedals) and his bopper's melodic imagination, developing solos at odds to the chords, or ducking and diving through modulations. Medeski, far from an orthodox Hammond-organ grinder, played percussively as much as he did harmonically, in choppy, hard-accented outbursts.

Scofield's experiments with electronics still sound a shade stiff, and the set took a while to ignite. But a beautiful slow ballad and some slamming free-grooving with short solo-swaps between the players set things churning. Scofield has sounded looser than this, but the tunes are memorable, and the band a rare balance (for funk, at least) of the nailed-down and the wild.