Irish Times writers review Drew Gress's Spin & Drift/Ronan Guilfoyle's Mappa Mundi/Michael Buckley Band/Tom Harrell Quintet at the Project and Late Night Shows, also at the Project.

The ESB Dublin Jazz Festival Project Weekender opened on Friday night with an imaginative, stimulating concert. And the inventiveness and musical daring came as much from local group Mappa Mundi as from the New York based Spin & Drift.

Mappa Mundi is Michael Buckley (saxophones), Greg Felton (keyboards), Ronan Guilfoyle (bass) and Sean Carpio (drums). Their repertoire, composed and arranged by Guilfoyle, is demanding music, full of rhythmic twists and turns, and surprising melodic lines, yet with sufficient openness within its structures to allow the performers considerable freedom. They took the opportunities it offered surprisingly well; the band has had few opportunities to play in public and therefore to internalise its intricacies and put its own stamp on them. It's no surprise that Guilfoyle and Buckley achieved much with the music, but the younger Felton and Carpio were also vital contributors; Felton is one of the finest young pianists to emerge here in recent years and Carpio, as he showed again at this concert, is an astonishingly talented drummer.

If they get the chance to play together as often as Spin & Drift they could be a force here. Bassist Drew Gress has frequently worked with alto saxophonist Tim Berne and drummer Tom Rainey and both are regular members of the group, while pianist Craig Taborn, in for regular member Uri Caine, slotted into place as if he had been there all his life.

Their music was no less adventurous than what had preceded it, but there was a greater tightness and sense of abandon about their performance. Taborn is a virtuoso with an apparently limitless well of ideas and an emotional range to match, while Gress showed a distinctive melodic and harmonic flair, all couched in a beautiful tone. Although Berne is a much less striking soloist than either, they make a formidable group, with the rapport between Taborn and the great Tom Rainey breath-taking.

Saturday night's main event saw Michael Buckley's talented new band share the bill with the Tom Harrell Quintet. In Buckley and guitarist Mike Nielsen it has players of international calibre, ably supported by bassist, Michael Coady, drummer Myles Drennan and pianist Phil Ware.

With the exception of an astringently reworked I Can't Get Started, all the band's music was written by the members. Despite having its moments, however, overall the concert lacked sufficient spark to animate consistently the skill and intelligence that went into its conception. This is a group with the capacity to make a bigger impact than it did on Saturday night.

Harrell's quintet is a working group. It showed in ensemble crispness and in the drive of an impeccable rhythm section - Xavier Davis (piano), Ugonna Okegwo (bass) and Quincy Davis (drums). However, tenor saxophonist Jimmy Green revealed more technique than inspiration, while Harrell, mostly playing flugelhorn, seemed more fragile than he was at the Guinness Jazz Festival last year.

He struggled at times, although he was able to put that fragility to lyrical use in Darn That Dream, a bass/flugelhorn duet.

On the night, pianist Xavier Davis was the band's strongest soloist, but the abiding impression was of the group's dynamic, almost clinical professionalism, rather than anything more memorable.

Propelled by a hurricane of second winds, audiences for the Dublin Jazz Weekender's trio of late night concerts came to understand the breathless optimism surrounding the new order of jazz.

For music that thrives on the moment, extracting verve from the capricious turns of immediate improvisation, jazz is heavy with contemplation of its future. Predictions have usually favoured experimentation and genre fusion, typically characterised by a refusal to compromise.

So it is with the new vanguard of contemporary jazz, scouring the dance floors of Europe for stylistic progress and basing their headquarters in the fusion-fertile fjords of Norway. The New Conception of Jazz (as Bugge Wesseltoft's enormously popular Oslo outfit would have it) soldered deep-house beats to crystalline electronica, tracing swathes of programmed ambience with furtive keyboard phrases.

Meanwhile the multi-cultural epicentre of Paris delivered Magic Malik Orchestra's playful blend of African polyrhythms, insistent beats and teasing flute lines; while Eivind Aarset's trio chilled funk, dance and jazz into a sharp and enticing concoction. But, like a taxi shared by strangers, all fusions have to negotiate with competing passengers calling out their own directions.

Playful to the point of flippancy, Malik Mezzadri delivered a loose set in which his flute chattered through a trademark vocalised delivery. At one point this style compellingly resembled a musician rapping through his woodwind, but more frequently the breathy assault recalled an asthmatic attack. When not breaking from his instrument in laughter, Mezzadri's more serious efforts pinned captivating melodies to stealthy beats, with Or Solomon's icy keyboards in stilted counterpoint to Sarah Murcia's warmer bass.

The dictates of the dance floor injected tension into Bugge Wesseltoft's jazz. Delayed by "technological difficulties" Oslo's most influential keys man may have been a few samples down, but infectiously programmed beats, turntables, jostling live drums and Rickard Gensollen's stirring bongos emptied seats and filled the floor with an energetic crowd.

Although melodic improvisation was fettered by unwavering rhythms of electronic decree, and his leadership seemed to abdicate to adept routine, Wesseltoft's generic blur was an uproarious highlight.

Concluding the weekend with drowsy, effects-saturated guitar, crackling drum machines and the darkest of bass grooves, Oslo's Electronique Noir suggested that the future of jazz will be shrouded in smoke machines and flickering blue lights.

Accentuating such atmospherics with acoustic foundation and electronic superstructure, Eivind Aarset's masterful trio created densely layered rhythms, upon which Aarset's spaced-out guitar was a sustained, searching but unobtrusive presence.

Whether this showcase of young European jazz acts indebted to sources as eclectic as Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis and Terje Rypdal really heralds the future, or even strictly qualifies as jazz at all, is highly debatable.

Right now, however, they all suggest sublime possibilities.