Here, in the belly of the beast, amongst the followers of this faith called ‘free’, howls the sound of a band not a million miles away from Live Evil-era Miles. The repetitive riff that resonates around the hall - essayed on distorted double, and high- pitched electric bass, underpinned by a frantic swinging cymbal pattern with a heavy back beat– is at large, soon to be punctured and eventually shot down by a screeching, narcotic noise of saxophone, resembling that of some monstrous bee violently bouncing off this fine hall’s walls, and something quite religious.

In his own typically uncompromising way, the 81-year old veteran saxophonist Ornette Coleman and his band are closing London’s Jazz festivities with a show anchored in the perverse. Such is the mind-bending attraction of the music and its furious, haphazard delivery, the resulting set - flicking through variations on calypso-funker Dancing In Your Head, ’68’s Round Trip and double bassist Tony Falanga’s beautifully-scarred tribute to Bach – favours often short, sharp arrangements with a baggy rock sensibility that rules out requests and any applause for striking solos.

It’s almost like this huge, lilac-lit stage, littered with Denardo Coleman’s stadium-sized drum set and some scruffy speaker cabs wired to electric bassist Al MacDowell, is like a magnetic force to Coleman’s hungry supporters, a place of worship that last landed here during his Meltdown run in 2009, but tonight here to issue a message of unrivalled musical versatility that this time continues to sting, and swing, for a little longer, past Ornette and MacDowell’s tender wrestle with encore Lonely Woman, and to this master’s next sonorous sermon. Amen.

– Mark Youll