This Sunday-section of the London Jazz Festival was reserved for sophisticates who like their jazz long on intelligence, sensuality and melody. Sassoon, whose solo-piano album, New Life, recently received rave reviews, opened it in confident style.

Though classically trained and not imbued with jazz traditions (she lists her favourites as Scriabin, Joni Mitchell, Steve Reich and Egberto Gismonti), she showed a fine ear for chord voicings and a left hand rhythmically strong enough to sustain her right-hand ideas. The title track from her album was the pick of well-judged set of sensitive improvisations.

Oregon, a quartet formed by guitarist-pianist-composer Ralph Towner and named after the university where his career began were warmly welcomed.

Paul McCandless, arguably the most versatile reedman in jazz, introduced "every horn the airlines will let me carry" before delivering brilliant, impassioned solos on oboe, cor Anglais, bass-clarinet, penny-whistle and soprano and sopranino saxophones.

Towner, darting between piano, synth keyboards, classical guitar and hybrid electric synth-guitar, was also in fine form. Bassist Glen Moore and percussionist Mark Walker manned the engines with finesse.

Hotter moments of the opening weekend came from two fire-breathing jazz dinosaurs. At 73, Wayne Shorter (Barbican, Friday) deserved all credit for playing hardball with a lethal improvising trio half his age.

Using only the barest sketches, including a hypermodern hint of his best-known theme, Footprints, Shorter hung on grimly as pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Pattitucci and drummer Brain Blade deconstructed his music.

Gleefully they switched tempos, rhythms and tonecentres as if bonded only by a "complete-this-sentence" kind of empathy, but Shorter's tenor and soprano saxes rode the tiger for a full hour of exhilarating tension and resolution.

The merely 66-year-old Herbie Hancock (Roundhouse, Saturday) projected even more machismo. In jeans and black T-shirt, he bounded around the stage with one of those cricketbat synth-keyboards hanging from his neck. The crowd gazed in awe as his electronic group gave Watermelon Man a thunderous stadium-jazz-rock makeover.

Of the super-sensitive piano genius of Miles Davis days there was no sign. Even sadder to say, Herbie was far from the weekend's deepest groover. That honour went to African Fender-bass virtuoso Richard Bona and his funktastic Jaco Pastorius tribute at the QEH on Saturday.