Trumpeter Terence Blanchard is making a dignified transition from youthful firebrand to elder statesman. At 20 he was the New Orleans discovery who followed Wynton Marsalis into the Jazz Messengers. A decade later he composed movie scores for Spike Lee, ghosting that soulful Mo’ Better Blues theme for Denzel Washington in the process.

Today he’s a leading figure in jazz education on the West Coast but still challenging himself amid a gifted new players. These can include his former students, such as Walter Smith III, a thoughtful young tenorist from Texas whose probing ideas and unusually mellow sound come from a splendidly unfashionable Ebonite hard-rubber mouthpiece.

Weaving inituitively in an out of tempo behind him and the bold Blanchard were bassist-composer Derrick Hodge, drummer Kendrick Scott and an elegant new pianist from Havana, Fabian Almazan. A thinking man’s rhythm section.

Their set-list, including Cyus, an impressionistic Smith piece, Touched by an Angel, Scott’s 3/4 ballad, and Bounce, some superslick neo-bop by the leader, forms a new album, Ideas, to be made in Blanchard’s home city. “It’s still important,” he noted, “to make the point of New Orleans as a place to be.”

Until tomorrow (020 7439 0747).