Last time New Yorker Andy Milne was in the UK he was playing piano with Ravi Coltrane. His return as leader of the four-piece Cosmic Dapp finds him attempting to explore and extend the boundaries of jazz, rap and funk, with mixed results. On the positive side, he is clearly doing a good job of attracting a young, hip audience to the wonders of jazz. There was a significant number of baseball cap-wearing youths at the gig, and the bemused mutterings of jazz veterans mingled with cries of "totally wicked". This was largely due to the presence on stage of a huge, black, bald rapper called Kokayi, whose image and musical contribution were impressive but initially misleading.

It appeared from the opening salvo of live hip-hop rhythms, funky bass playing and sassy New York rapping that this was to be an evening of adventurous contemporary fusion. However, large portions of the gig uncomfortably resembled a mid-1980s jazz-funk instructional video, with the band systematically demonstrating slap-bass techniques and tricky double-bass drum rudiments. It didn't help that the actual music was often pedestrian and characterless, too reliant on Herbie Hancock-style funk work-outs and inexcusably self-indulgent solos.

Kokayi oozed vast amounts of charisma - he had the phrasing of a great singer, the swagger of a brilliant hip-hop artist, and the timing of an accomplished comedian. His most riveting performance was a deadpan lampoon of the Jerry Springer show, which was almost Zappa-esque in its fusion of wryly satirical lyrics and terrifyingly complex musical accompaniment.

But Kokayi kept going off-stage and, without him, Cosmic Dapp lost themselves in a void of muso exhibitionism. Milne's own playing was discordantly meandering, and the band even strayed once or twice into prog-rock territory, with Milne's Yamaha keyboard and Rich Brown's disjointed bass-playing bizarrely summoning the twin ghosts of Level 42 and Hawkwind. Perhaps wicked was the right word after all.