The F-ire Festival's opening night featured a chamber jazz nonet, a piano trio drawn from London's Loop jazz collective and a headlining concert from pianist/composer Django Bates's 19-pieceDanish-based big band. A night of fusions, fancies and crystal-clear acoustics, it took a spiky modern piano trio to provide consistency.

The opening Fringe Magnetic, a nine-piece playing music by trumpeter Rory Simmons, fizzed rather than sparkled. The neo-classical scoring for clarinets, strings and flute created soft but angular textures and there was lots of collective improv over stripped-down rhythms. James Allsopp warmed things up on bass clarinet, but vocalist Elisabeth Nygaard singing about "Empty Spaces" rather cooled things down. It felt as if someone had just discovered Gunther Schuller's late 1950s Third Stream experiments.

With the stage cleared of clutter, the rhythm section returned as Phronesis, bassist Jasper Holby's neat trio featuring Ivo Neame on piano and StoRMChaser's Anton Eger drummer sitting in on drums sitting in. Compositions began with snappy riffs, four-chord loops or a brace of rolls on mallets. It is music of intimate detail and linear development, full of open spaces, darting counterpoint and sudden stops. And they sound good, with hiss-and-rattle drums locked into warm-toned contrapuntal bass, led by the piano's percussive self-harmonising attack.

StoRMChaser, Bates's well-drilled Danish big band, is an extension of his wayward imagination, and zipped through a collage of interlocking riffs, fractured national anthems and film-score fragments with well-drilled dexterity. A genuinely funny cod stockmarket reading opened, birdwhistles, fanfares and space soon followed, but the welter of genre-bending and contradictory juxtapositions dazzled and frustrated in roughly equal measure. Vocalist Josefine Lindstrand impressively mastered the shifting sands and subtle flicks of Bates's orchestral mayhem to create a surreal blend of 1950s optimism and impending doom.

In spite of great solos, heaps of imagination and music clear in concept and technically superb, it became samey after a while until the bent-out-of-shape horns of the funky "Something Less Soothing" perked things up. A delightfully extruded "In the Mood" and a short, Latinesque "Sheep" won the encore, an action-painting "New York, New York".

F-ire Festival continues until SaturdayTel 0844 264 0321