The Pizza Express Jazz Club this week hosts a F-IRE Collective four-day festival with double bills each night at the Soho club in London. On the opening night this Wednesday the Collective’s guiding light Barak Schmool brings his Cuban bata fusion band Méta Méta to Dean Street playing opposite French guitarist Jonathan Bratoeff’s Quartet.

F-IRE which began in the late-1990s and stands for Fellowship for Integrated Rhythmic Expression grew out of a West African dance music workshop. Schmool has been a key mentor to the more creative wing of the new generation of jazz music college graduates who have poured out of the conservatoires from the late-1990s on, partly as a teacher at City University and the Royal Academy of Music and as an encourager to artists keen to push their own careers forward via co-operative means.

F-IRE has moved on to a new phase in its history as many of its main bands have made the leap to new opportunities in their careers touring nationally and abroad and playing to bigger audiences including the likes of 3io’s Robert Mitchell, The Invisible’s David Okumu and many others.

The festival’s second night (Thursday) highlights two bands of the new wave with Danish bassist Jasper Høiby’s Phronesis opposite the pianist Dave O’Brien’s Peter Whittingham award-winning band Porpoise Corpus.

Friday sees saxophonist Stéphane Payen’s Thôt plus the Indo-jazz trio The Teak Project who return to the club following a memorable appearance at last year’s Indo-Jazzwise weekender.

The final night, Saturday, has one of the biggest names on the F-IRE roster from the days of the collective’s first flowerings, Polar Bear drummer Seb Rochford with cutting edge saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and American-born theremin player Pamelia Kurstin. They are opposite BBC New Generations artist Tom Arthurs (pictured) with pianist Richard Fairhurst playing a series of pieces Arthurs has composed titled Postcards from Pushkin.

– Stephen Graham

To book go to www.pizzaexpresslive.co.uk