The schooled virtuosity, modernist outlook and supple swing of Dominique Pifarély helped revitalise jazz violin in the late 1970s. But since playing with composer Mike Westbrook’s experimental bands of the 1980s, the French violinist has slipped somewhat off the UK radar, and this was his first local gig for a while. He was teamed with regular bassist Bruno Chevillon and two Americans, Tim Berne on alto sax and pianist Craig Taborn. This was no slung-together, last-minute transatlantic bash but a well-rehearsed quartet, midway through a European tour. And the repertoire was as original as the line-up was unorthodox.

Pifarély’s music stirs the melodic outlines of modern jazz and the chromatic cadences of 20th-century classical music into a jagged rhythmic stew. Each instrument is one piece of an ever-evolving, extremely complex musical jigsaw in which long, angular unison passages emerge out of intense improv only to dissolve into disjointed canons, extruded fugues or acerbic countermelodies. And with no drummer to airbrush mistakes, it was perhaps inevitable that such engrossing music achieved genuine, encore-winning uplift only in the second set.

Pifarély’s compositions are as intense as their doom-laden titles – the second set triptych was “La Penseé Sauvage”, “Destructions des Villes” and “Disaster Recalled” – and his structures suitably chock-full of incident. The gig opened with solo violin delivering a mid-range tremolo; bass added a fractured counterpoint and sax a third floating melody. And as each part evolved, there were improvised duets, full-on group improv, and an ominous, concluding two-note pedal that sounded like the muffled feet of a secret army on the march – appropriate for its title, “Intimations of Chaos”.

Each composition yielded similar riches. Roles were swapped freely for textural variety and the inner pulse was strong. Highlights included a scratchy duet for piano and bass, Pifarély and Berne’s singing instrumental lead and Taborn’s spidery, funk-implying excursions. But really this was an ensemble effort in which elliptic foundations had the power of orthodox riffs, and the quartet morphed between pinpoint accuracy and off-the-leash improvisation.