London's F-ire Collective, that loose aggregation of jazz, world, improv and avant-groove investigators, is staging a mini-festival at its local, the Vortex. Testifying to the respected Collective's international connections, Sunday night saw a double bill for this year's UK jazz trumpet discovery, Tom Arthurs, and the French sax-and-laptop duo of Stephane Payen and Olivier Sens.

Computer-musician Sens has invented an ingenious piece of sound-modifying software called Usine, and sax-improviser Payen embarked on a series of conversations with it. Payen mixed a balletic Charlie Parkerish lightness with Evan Parker's squirting sonic abstractions - to which the computer added warped sampled speech, booming amplifications of the lower notes, cymbal beats or Indian percussion following Payen's rhythm patterns, and a lot more. It was often irresistibly groovy, and unexpectedly lyrical.

The music brass-player Tom Arthurs shares with bassist Jasper Hoiby and drummer Stu Ritchie is jazzier, edgier and more explicitly intense. Arthurs is superb on both trumpet and flugelhorn (comparisons with the young Kenny Wheeler aren't out of place), his tone pure, his range effortlessly wide.

An improv dialogue with the inventive Ritchie's clicks, shuffles and castanet-like sounds preceded a stuttering melody over a bumpy Latin swing, fitfully interrupted by brief bursts of hard-rock drumming. Saxist Payen joined in for a warmly harmonised, almost Lennie Tristano-like linear theme and a fine ducking-and-diving sax solo, and then came something resembling random fragments of a Charlie Parker theme over non-bop time.

Arthurs often played in flurries of notes intended to trigger the explosive Ritchie, switching to glowing long sounds when the percussion and bass were furnishing the principal action. This threesome has deserved all the praise it's received this year. They are due for a lot more.

· The F-ire Collective Festival runs until December 18. Details: F-ire.com