Jazz: Andy Hague Quintet, Jazzland, Swansea

When it comes to fame in music there are only so many places on the bus, and in British jazz the service has been cancelled for most of the last two decades. "There'll be another one along in a minute" fails to convince if you've been standing in the rain for half a lifetime. When the saxophonist Andy Sheppard won a national jazz competition and a contract with Island Records 20 years ago, his young contemporaries in Bristol could reasonably expect to be next in the queue. The trumpeter and composer Andy Hague, right, with whom Sheppard continues to play locally, was a young bandleader with a hard-driving, Blue Note-styled quintet and a devoted following of fans. His colleague Ben Waghorn, a teenage tenor sax player with a precociously soulful sound, was surely another Sheppard or Tommy Smith in the making.

The breaks never came but the band kept playing, and getting better. On this opening date of a Jazz Services tour in a marvellously atmospheric club, the collective impact of what amounts to a south-west super-group was close to overpowering. If you can imagine Horace Silver's "Song for my Father" crossed with McCoy Tyner's "Passion Dance", with a strong dash of Kenny Wheeler-style plangency added to the mix, you get an idea of what Hague's catchy compositions sound like. There's no namby-pamby post-modernism, just yer proper modern jazz in the great tradition, both Afro and Anglo. The superb rhythm team of Simon Gore (drummer for Andy Sheppard's first Island groups), and Riaan Vosloo, (bassist with the hip Nostalgia 77) sets a testing pace but every time the solo baton passes to either Waghorn or pianist Jim Blomfield, the room hots up. Conversations stop; jaws hit the floor.

Where almost every other young tenor player reminds you of Michael Brecker channelling John Coltrane, Waghorn really does sound like Coltrane. His fluent, mazy lines are delivered in a bluesy torrent, phrases cascading from the bell of his horn. He looks embarrassed by the applause. On piano (well, an electric keyboard here) Jim Blomfield is a marvel. Like the great Andrew Hill, who died last week, his style is percussive, extravagant. Opening a solo piano double-bill in Bristol, Blomfield stole the show from Gwilym Simcock, and he's the new Chick Corea. The band who missed the bus might get there in the end.

The White Swan, Stratford upon Avon (01789 552312), tonight; 606 Club, London (020 7352 5953), Tues; The Mermaid, Plymouth (01752 780 195), 6 May; touring.