Christian McBride Band, Jazz Café, London

"Americans are always cold when they come over here," one club manager said to me recently. His words came to mind as Christian McBride's band took to the stage at the Jazz Café. The drummer, Terreon Gully, was so oblivious to the heat in the Camden club that he was wrapped up in a scarf. He and McBride were wearing hats, although the leader took the dress honours; pinstripe trousers topped by a velour pyjama top, not-so-discreet silver jewellery and the light glinting off his glasses. McBride looked super fly all right.

Fly is part of what this band is all about. As a teenage prodigy McBride came under the influence of the puritanical Young Lions movement. He was their bass player (acoustic, naturally) of choice in the early Nineties. "For a short time I did have that prejudice," says McBride in the current issue of Jazzwise. "Acoustic bass players should never use amplifiers, fusion is bad, all of Miles's records after Bitches Brew were pretty bad. But one day I said, 'That's not really how I feel.' I love that stuff, so why should I negate that kind of music?"

McBride's current line-up is a celebration of that Seventies jazz-rock fusion, signalled from the thick rolling chords of the opening "Technicolor Nightmare". Although the band is a quartet, they produce a very full electronic sound. A big middle is provided by Geoff Keezer, a keyboard genius whose wolfish grin makes him look like Iggy Pop after his mother's given him a haircut. Keezer had four decks – a grand piano, Rhodes, Moog synthesiser and a slimline Hammond – from which he teased a Zawinulesque palate of sound, alternately fluty, rich and brassy, heavy and distorting, in which the clearer tone of the piano was the light in the clearing after the thickets before. Gully is a fleet, cymbally drummer, toms tuned to get a higher-pitched, drier hit.

Ron Blake, the horn player, used to be distinguished by a goatee that hung from his chin like a thread of liquorice. Sadly, he's shaved it off. He's a good flautist and soprano player, but like many who specialise in that range hasn't quite got the weight on tenor sax. He seemed in danger of being slightly overwhelmed.

Confidence is not something the leader is short of. On a Jaco Pastorius number McBride, now on electric bass, bubbled and popped his way through the fast samba rhythm, at other times producing a fat, bendy fretless sound or using a pedal to unleash a subterranean monster of a note. He's simply astounding and, despite some early numbers that needed tighter direction, by the time they closed with the Weather Report favourite "Boogie Woogie Waltz", an awesome, thrashing riot of sound was issuing. McBride clearly enjoys mining this seam, and if some disapprove I think he's happy to tell them where they can stick their opinion.