Avishai Cohen, the young Israeli bassist, pianist, composer and Chick Corea sideman, was one of the most talked-about rising stars on the international jazz scene last year. His percussive, impassioned bass-playing more than earned the comparisons with Charles Mingus; he emerged, moreover, as a world-jazz composer of real vision, his music influenced by Sephardic folk-song, Cuban jazz, funk and postbop. Colors, Cohen's marvellous album of evocative melodies, rich ensemble colours and restless contrasts, rightly ended up on a few faves-of-2000 lists.
Cohen's return to London after last year's absorbing Pizza Express season was thus eagerly awaited. He shares the bill at Ronnie Scott's with saxophonist Iain Ballamy: an appropriate choice, since Ballamy is one of the UK's most imaginative improvisers, and another composer who shakes and manipulates the materials of contemporary jazz and other idioms to discover new relationships between them.
Perhaps the title of Cohen's new band - the Avishai Cohen International Vamp Band - provided a clue as to how this show would turn out. Vamping frequently features in Latin jazz, with the pianist pumping the same chord-pattern over and over until somebody (usually a trumpeter) pitches in to make it sound interesting. Cohen has built this group around a core of Latin grooving. He takes the piano-pumping role, joined by Yagil Baras on bass, and Argentinian trumpeter Diego Urcola, an explosively dramatic performer whose dazzlingly bright playing recalls the fierce effervescence of Arturo Sandoval. Avi Lebovich, the elegant trombonist, and Cohen's regular arranger, is the only common link with the Colors band.
The Vamp Band is intentionally quite a different project, however. The exchanges between Urcola, Lebovich and saxophonist/percussionist Yosvany Terry often catch exactly the impulsive, conversational Cuban-jazz energy Cohen is after. But the subtlety of texture from last year is missing. One of the most absorbing features in Colors was Cohen's own bass sound intertwining with Amos Hoffman's oud; here the leader hardly plays bass at all. The piano's improvising potential, meanwhile, is mostly shut down by Cohen's concentration on its cheerleading qualities. Etude, a piece that neatly splices Latin grooving with classical melodic diversions of swirling lyricism, did indicate the audacity with which Cohen can remould the broad range of materials on his palette. But this seems like a band assembled for quite different reasons.
· Until Saturday. Box office: 020-7439 0747.
