For followers of major jazz stars, life can be like commuting on the No19 bus. You wait ages for one then four arrive at once.

Take last week's crazy scenario: two unmissable icons, pianist McCoy Tyner and guitarist John McLaughlin, hit town within days of the Johnny Griffin-Roy Hargrove-Billy Cobham epic at Ronnie Scott's and the sizzling Roberto Fonseca-Esperanza Spalding package at the Barbican.

Exasperating, not to mention hard on the pocket, but a challenge impossible to ignore.

Tyner's quartet, featuring Joe Lovano's conversational, husky-voiced tenor sax, were in particularly rewarding form. McCoy is still the real deal.

Looking fitter and happier than in the recent past, the great pianist exuded the unforced intensity of an artist who has made major discoveries and absorbed them into a fully personal style which now flows with an energy of its own.

His tuneful modal originals (Angelina, Search for Peace and the 6/8 Fly With the Wind) developed the rolling momentum of all Tyner performances, with bassist Gerald Cannon and drummer Eric Gravatt basking in his resonant, semi-damped chordwork.

Even better was their piano-trio number, a masterly version of I'll Take Romance with a subtle harmonic update in the opening four bars that Tyner's late boss, John Coltrane, would have appreciated.

John McLaughlin
Barbican
*****
Similarly giant steps were made at the Barbican the following night when John McLaughlin introduced his new quartet, The 4th Dimension.

"Two of the guys are from your town," said Yorkshire-born McLaughlin, now Monaco-based after 30-odd years in the USA and speaking in a unusual accent, not so much mid-Atlantic as trans-global.

His talent, of course, is intergalactic. Using a simple Strat-like black solid-body guitar by Godin - "not custom-made," he insisted afterwards, "straight off the shelf" - he was in searing form on numbers old (Senor CS, The Unknown Dissident) and new (Maharina, Five Peace Band). New Blues summed up his consistent ability to take traditional forms to the most fashionable places.

His picking was as fast and his tone as gritty as any rock-star's but his hip sense of space and economy made other statements as lyrical and telling as any Carlos Santana ballad.

No less dazzling in support were Hounslow's drum hero Mark Mondesir, Leeds's ultra-versatile drum/keyboard wizard Gary Husband, and Dominique Di Piazza, a French bass-guitar virtuoso as blindingly fast as Johnnie Mac himself.

A true supergroup, indeed, and not an American in sight.