If there’s a problem with a certain strain of contemporary jazz, it’s not that it’s run out of ideas. It’s that there are rather too many of them.

Michael Janisch is a well-connected American bassist who has been based in London for many years, and his Paradigm Shift is a six-piece boasting some hugely impressive talents. It features tight, swaggering harmonies from Paul Booth on tenor sax and Jason Yarde on soprano, clattering polyrhythms from drummer Andrew Bain and busy, propulsive basslines from Janisch himself, while Alex Bonney not only plays trumpet, but sonically manipulates the rest of the band through his laptop, applying digital delay and assorted effects in real time as they play.

The problem is that Janisch’s songs are overwritten, filled with unruly rhythms, grinding basslines and headache-inducing melodies. Tonight’s set is filled with fascinating fragments: an Ornette Coleman-style punk-jazz freakout; a 33-beat raga cycle that recalls Herbie Hancock’s early-70s Mwandishi Sextet; and plenty of ambient explorations, some featuring Booth on didgeridoo. But, just as each of them threatens to get interesting, Janisch lurches on to something else, like a waiter retrieving your half-finished dinner. Brilliant, but infuriating.

Less flashy but rather more focused are the support act, Curios, led by pianist Tom Cawley. Cawley is no stranger to complicated: the title track of his album Captive sounds like Coltrane’s Giant Steps placed in front of a wobbly fairground mirror, while one stock-in-trade is for him to spray out complex and scribbly improvisations in octaves. But here, at least the ideas have space to breathe. Tonight’s special guest, Loose Tubes saxophonist Iain Ballamy, adds another dimension to the trio, introducing some of his own whimsical compositions, never overplaying and understanding restraint. Sometimes less really is more.