There is a scene in Warren Leight's play when three jazz trumpeters sit side by side on bar stools listening to a bootleg recording of legendary trumpeter Clifford Brown, made the night before his fatal car crash. As the music curls like smoke across the auditorium of the Apollo Shaftesbury in London, the men's eyes begin to glaze and their jaws become slack in response. They look like customers in an opium den or junkies who have just had a fix.
The idea - oft mooted elsewhere - of the relationship between jazz and drugs comes across strong in this play, a haunting riff of a drama about parent-son relationships, the madness of disappointment and the way the gift of music can open some doors of perception and slam others shut. As the young Clifford (named in honour of the dead Brown) muses about his father, the jazz trumpeter, Gene: "I never understood how he could sense everything when he was blowing and sense nothing when he wasn't." Always married to his music and more at ease with his musician friends than in his own home, it is Gene's neglect of his wife, Terry, that tips her over the edge into madness.
This is a memory play, and like so many memory plays it is seen through a spun sugar haze in which the distant past is always better than the near past and the near past better than the awful present. "From what I understand," says Jason Priestley's not surprisingly emotional Clifford, "everyone was happy before I was born."
There is added poignancy in the fact it takes place between 1953 and 1985, which saw the decline of New York's jazz clubs. Gathering around the radio to hear Elvis Presley's first record, one of the characters predicts: "That kid will do for jazz what the talkies did for Buster Keaton." Gene and the others laugh him off, blithely unaware that they are dodos on the edge of extinction.
The evening often comes within a whisker of sentimentality and sometimes falls into the trap of romanticising jazz musicians, but there is something tough about both the writing and its sentiments. "Wow, she broke Bakelite," observes the teenage Clifford as his mother hurls a cup in a drunken rage at the feckless Gene. Nothing will break this play: at times it is almost unbearable to watch as it charts the disintegration of Gene and Terry's marriage, with the boy Clifford condemned to play peacekeeper and Red Cross in the middle.
The accents of the American cast take some getting used to, but the acting is diamond hard in that thrillingly wired way that is so distinctively American. Priestley, leaving Beverly Hills 90210 far behind, is immensely touching; Edie Falco, of Sopranos fame, goes noisily nutty as she realises that she will always play second fiddle to jazz, and Frank Wood is superb as Gene, a man who can talk to his son through his trumpet but can't even look him in the eye.
• At the Apollo Shaftesbury, London W1, till May 6. Box office: 0171-494 5070.
