Wynton Marsalis, Barbican Centre, London

Many barbed comments have been levelled at Wynton Marsalis over the years - that he is overly conservative, backward-looking, more concerned with jazz's status as a museum exhibit than as a living, progressive art form. But all of these remarks would have been otiose when the New Orleans-born trumpeter and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra took the stage at the Barbican last night. For the concert was a straightforward celebration of the past, specifically of the role of the railroad in jazz, back to its beginning. "We believe in bringing people with us," said Marsalis, announcing a number from 1925. "We'd play a tune from 1325 if jazz was that old."

Once that was accepted - that nothing remotely modern was going to issue forth from the massed ranks of horns, no bebop licks, nor any of the cold furnace-forged phrases that made Marsalis a teenage sensation in 1980 - one could relax and enjoy the ride. And what a ride.

The rhythms of the railroad drove jazz from the syncopated beats of the delta blues to the steam piston motion of the Thirties and Forties big band. Often literally, for jazz's emigration from New Orleans to Chicago, and then to New York, was often via the gleaming metallic trucks.

The LCJO conjured the journeys of these glamorous modern machines with an armoury of slow chugs, whizzing circular spokes, shrill whistle calls and clattering telegraph pick-ups. A full range of images were present, both in the Duke Ellington compositions of the first set and the Marsalis originals of the second.

Marsalis was a modest director, but hinted at why he is considered such a virtuoso with warm, fluffy-toned solos and flights of casually-produced brilliance.

On other occasions I have been mercilessly cutting about Marsalis. Last night he and the LCJO provided a concert of sepia - even, perhaps, early technicolour-tinted delight. For once I am glad to say: bravo, Maestro Marsalis.