It's rare to find anybody swinging at the Vortex these days, and even rarer when the soloist responsible has a jazz mind as all-powerful as that of Uri Caine.

This classically trained New York pianist, composer and polymath wears his learning lightly. Few performers meld Mahler with Monk, a feat Caine managed last night (steering a minorkey folk melody stealthily into Round Midnight) with impeccable logic and honest enjoyment.

Unlike so many dismal jazz intellectuals, Caine never forgets the importance of the beat. The harmonic sequence of Fats Waller's gem, Honeysuckle Rose, travelled to unexpected new places, but these cerebral pleasures were skilfully bolstered by a muscular neo-stride pattern that gained rhythmic momentum throughout the performance. ESP, the Wayne Shorter theme so perfect that Miles Davis kept repeating it, swam through the keys in dreamlike disguises while Caine used other devices, including walking finger-bass and some stabbing left-hand octaves in the best Oscar Peterson tradition, to keep his right-hand ideas airborne.

All good clean musical fun, and all the more enjoyable after a painful opening set by pianist Richard Fairhurst and flugelhornist Tom Arthurs. An hour of their barren, achingly precious musings had seemed like an eternity.

• Tonight (020 7254 4097).