The Critics: Jazz: Whatever it is, it goes to your head

Danilo Perez Pizza Express, WC2 Joe Zawinul Ronnie Scott's, WC2 Dino Saluzzi St Godolph's, Vienna

Whether or not it is true that jazz was formed from a soup of Sousa marches, French quadrilles and Latin habaneros, along with the drumming and vocal embellishments of slaves gathered in New Orleans' Congo Square, the broth is still simmering and new ingredients keep being added all the time.

Just this week we've had a Panamanian pianist playing Billy Strayhorn to a Latin beat, an Austrian keyboardist stirring bits of Mali, Tibet, and just about everything else into a basic stock of Afro-American funk, and an Argentinian tango master swapping licks with a German string quartet.

At Soho's Pizza Express on Wednesday, the pianist Danilo Perez, accompanied by a Nu Yorican (ie New York Puerto Rican) bassist, and a Mexican drummer, subjected the iconic jazz ballad "Lush Life" to a Central American makeover. It wasn't that the tune was tricked up with superfluous trills, or that anyone was wearing a frilly shirt or shaking maracas; rather that Perez approached the notes with his customary attention to the rhythmic measures that make Latin music so distinctive. Deconstructing Strayhorn's melody through percussive runs on the keyboard, he made the beautiful, if undeniably careworn, louche lament live again. As Perez was at pains to inform us, this wasn't Latin jazz; how could it be, he asked, when there wasn't a conga drum on stage?

Down the road at Ronnie Scott's, Joe Zawinul showed just how far he has come from his native Austria. Classically trained in Vienna, he moved to Boston in 1959 to study at Berkeley, but almost immediately packed in academia to go on the road. With Cannonball Adderley, he wrote the funkiest of jazz jukebox hits, "Mercy Mercy Mercy", then joined Miles Davis for the pioneering years of jazz fusion that led to the Bitches' Brew, before co-founding Weather Report with Wayne Shorter. Now 65, and looking like an all-American, blue-collar Union boss, Zawinul mixes jazz- funk with digital samples of world music in as loud and forthright manner as you can imagine.

Although he's the composer of some of the most sensitive ballads in the jazz songbook, Zawinul now prefers to rock with a heavy mob of musos who play with such manic intensity that watching them is exhausting. The levels of musicianship and volume are staggeringly high, and there's a kind of marvellous folly in the pursuit of such an unforgivingly clamorous din. You wouldn't want to experience it every night - unless you get your kicks hanging around musical instrument shops on Saturday afternoons.

Finally, in Zawinul's homeland, at the monastery of St Gerold's, the Argentinian bandoneon player (the tango version of an accordionist), Dino Saluzzi, performed his new album, Kultrum, with the Rosamunde Quartet. While Joe has shrugged off his European background in favour of an Afro- American skin, Saluzzi has discarded his folk roots to write a series of tango variations for the quartet that aspire to the condition of art-music. The result, perhaps surprisingly, is wonderful, with a subtle kind of transference taking place between the partners. As they play, the quartet become more abandoned to the passion of the moment, while Saluzzi, who is a master improviser, appears increasingly restrained, keeping his eyes on the score. But when the opportunity for a sustained improvised cadenza occurs, Saluzzi's squeeze-box becomes a string quartet all on its own, wheezing out lines of violin and cello-like subtlety that in the spacious acoustic of the church sound as sublime as Schubert or Beethoven.

Is it jazz, Latin music or pure art? Whatever, the soup continues to thicken satisfyingly, thank you very much.

Danilo Perez's 'Central Avenue' is on Impulse Records. 'Kultrum' by Dino Saluzzi and the Rosamunde String Quartet is released on ECM on 9 November.