Charlie "Yardbird" Parker might have celebrated his 80th birthday last night if cirrhosis, dropsy, heart disease and drug addiction had not killed him at only 35.

Tragic, but at least it spared that towering genius the ordeal of hearing Django Bates and Evan Parker mark the occasion by mangling his music beyond all recognition.

Pianist Bates, working with bassist Mike Mondesir and drummer Steve Davis, was at his most irritating.

Richly talented yet ever prone to whimsy and childishly eager to shock, he deconstructed Parker classics like Billie's Bounce, Hot House and Scrapple From the Apple by constantly switching from beautifully accurate chord voicings one moment to empty high-energy abstractions, complete with jangling bell-cymbals and strange falsetto cries, the next.

Any creative jazz performer has the right to make a piece sound more like himself than itself, but without taste at work the results recalled those surrealist painters who placed an eye beside an armpit and left no face under the bowler hat.

When Evan Parker joined the trio after the break there was more stylistic unity, for this dedicated free-improv saxophonist never compromises.

"I'd like it taken into account," Bates had jovially pleaded at the outset, "that I've just taken heroin for the first time." If only he had.