Full Steam Ahead, a celebration of US railroads, was an inspired theme for this concert. Most musicians love trains and enjoy making train music, and this 16-piece orchestra is unrivalled at revitalising great arrangements of the past. They set off grandly with a slow-medium blues featuring a long and languid trumpet solo by their New Orleans-raised leader, Wynton Marsalis.

"Southerners like to swoop and scoop on a note," he pithily observed after setting the tone for an evening of superb scores, many by Duke Ellington and all flawlessly played in the spirit of the original recordings. The soloists were top-class, none more than Fife-born baritone saxman Joe Temperley and former London trombonist Elliot Mason. "Now you have jazz - by an Englishman, a Scotsman and somebody from Cleveland," smiled Marsalis after featuring these two with tenorist Walter Blanding in one of the show's highlights.

For an encore, trombonist Vincent Gardner sang the blues while a septet syncopated gently, Basin Street style. Then Marsalis abruptly reeled off a fast and furious neobop solo on Cherokee, as if to show the gleaming steel beneath the velvet glove. The contemporary validity of his orchestra may be debatable, but its quality is indisputable.