Saxophonist and flautist Finn Peters' Finntet won the best band prize on the BBC jazz awards last year for their album Su-Ling, which elegantly integrated Latin grooving, African and Javanese music, contemporary-classical flute soliloquies, Mardi Gras funk, electronics and free-jazz - among other things.

Playing live, Peters can erupt into fierce sax-blasting improvisations at times, but for the most part he is guided by composition. This can give his sophisticated work a cautious quality, from a jazz point of view. There was a fine band of improvisers (including guitarist David Okumu and pianist Nick Ramm) at the Vortex, but they rarely slipped the leash. This is a composer's band, using jazz freedoms tellingly but sparingly, and an eager audience cheered as if they had blown the roof off.

Peters was road-testing new material for Su-Ling's successor this year, and the spread of references sounded just as wide. A lullaby-like six-note motif repeated over a build-up from fluently subtle drummer Tom Skinner until it became a brief free-sax squall. A dancing North African groove - Peters called it "camel-riding music" - developed through rich tone-changes from Peters' flute and Okumu's ghostly guitar chords. And the classical delicacy of a Messiaen-influenced birdsong theme was gently abraded by the blurting electronics of Matthew Yee King. Skinner, Ramm and bassist Phil Donkin unobtrusively enriched the airily folksy piece that followed, hinting at spontaneous breakouts that never quite came.

The second half opened on a powerful collective dialogue with Balinese connections. A rhapsodic classical-flute interlude contrasted sharply with an ensuing free-jazz sax odyssey, before Peters wound up the gig with the catchy, funkily hard-driving Red Fish, from his first album. A little more of that energy would have been welcome elsewhere, but the erudite Peters' broad idiomatic sweep sounds as if it is fast expanding.