MUSIC : Also known as jazz

African Classical Music St George's, Bristol

Despite the extravagant fly-posting of a beautiful poster around town, the audience for this concert could have easily fitted into someone's front room. Indeed, for a while it seemed as if we might all be accommodated quite comfortably inside the lid of the grand piano. Whatever the reasons, the conjunction of the words "classical" and "African" did not create the expected buzz: perhaps someone should have flagged up jazz instead; at least that might have alerted the few who were in the know about the two featured composers.

For Paul Gladstone-Reid turned out to be the same Paul Reid who made the cover of The Wire magazine in 1989 as Sheffield's wunderkind version of Cecil Taylor, and Tunde Jegede is relatively well known as the kora player in Orphy Robinson's Anavas Project. The notion of African classical music was also a little confusing - anyone expecting a bit of reclaimed Beethoven, or even Scott Joplin, would have been disappointed - and the repertoire mixed traditional Malian music for kora (harp-lute) and flute with original compositions that took off from the idea of African forms into contemporary territory. The results were almost wholly enjoyable, with string quartets by both Reid and Jegede - played by members of the London Sinfonietta - quite outstanding. The entrancing sound of the kora, a kind of ecstatic tingling in the ear, underlay almost everything that was played, whether the instrument was featured or not.

The evening began, after introductions by the immaculate Reid - wearing a page-boy haircut of almost Louise Brooks proportions - with Jegede and his sister, Maya Jobarteh, in a duet of harp-lutes that set the dominant tone of gently rolling rhythmical waves. A wooden-flute solo in the nomadic Fulani tradition by Jan Hendrickse followed before the first quartet, Jegede's Light in the Circle of Truth. Here a melancholy, almost minimalist line provided a basis for the counterpoint of the strings. Reid's solo piano piece Ancestral Hymns deftly worked in a mass of churchy references, from Pentecostal songs to South African hymns in the manner of Abdullah Ibrahim, before resolving itself into the ANC anthem. The jazz touches continued when Jegede and Juwon Ogungbe joined Reid on percussion instruments, the pianist's Keith Jarrett-like rhapsodies floating on a pulse of marimba and balafon rhythms.

Reid's own string quartet, Books of Remembrance, was edgier than Jegede's, with a Nymanesque tautness and a number of plucked passages that continued the percussive theme. Jegede's Cycle of Reckoning, featuring strings, flute, kora and piano, closed the performance in a moving lament for "a betrayed nation and people". It was the end to a wonderful concert; if it was as much European as African, and more contemporary new music than classical, what's in a word or two? And with a poster that is drop-dead gorgeous (not to mention the matinee-idol looks of Reid himself - record companies take note) it deserves a much wider hearing than the brief three dates of this tour.