It's not always the music that makes a gig stand out. Factors such as atmosphere also come into play - as they do at the Vortex, one of London's most popular sharp-end jazz and improv clubs. Certainly this packed house's reaction to the mixed American/British group Big Air was ecstatically noisy. But the group deserved it.

Big Air was the brainchild of former Loose Tubes trumpet/ sax duo Chris Batchelor and Steve Buckley. The group combines the duo's ragged-edged free-jazz virtuosity with the remarkable piano of American Myra Melford (a gifted descendant of the high-density Cecil Taylor school), the furiously inventive American drummer Jim Black (who can sometimes heard over here with Tim Berne) and Britain's Oren Marshall - the Jimi Hendrix of the riotously plugged tuba.

The band was performing Batchelor and Buckley's Ten Tall Tales, a Jazz on 3/Arts Council commission. The music is hard to define concisely - perhaps a stripped-down version of Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra with the Dirty Dozen Brass Band for a rhythm section, with Cecil Taylor appearing as featured soloist might get somewhere near it.

The Liberation Music aspect was recalled by the lurching, soaring trumpet/saxophone ensembles of The Wizard, Buckley's ethereal wails harmonising with Batchelor's bold, painterly trumpet lines. A total contrast usually followed such intense moments, like Buckley's innocently capering penny-whistle lines blending with Batchelor's muted effects, and Melford on minimalist harmonium. But then a long-lined, serpentine, post-boppish theme would sweep it all away, with Melford's chemistry of taut accuracy and blistering abstract arpeggios rising imperiously out of the mêlée.

It was fascinating to hear such a band within days of encountering Ornette Coleman at the Barbican - many of Big Air's mercurial, multi-rhythmic melodies come straight from the musical revolution Coleman initiated over 40 years ago.

The later stages of the gig moved through some unexpectedly forthright bluesy grooves, and close to the finale Marshall took off on an extraordinary odyssey of what you might call grunge-tuba, which sparked Jim Black into his idiosyncratic, dazzling combination of rhythmic looseness and quicksilver momentum.

Definitely a candidate for gig of the year.

• Big Air play the Wardrobe, Leeds (0113-274 2486), tonight.