LAST Monday's visit of saxophonist Tim Garland and bassist Andy Cleyndert, organised by Trinity Jazz Society, turned out to be something of a curate's egg. The quartet, completed by Jim Doherty (piano) and John Wadham (drums), took quite some time to settle, not least because it was asking a lot to have difficult material, such as Kenny Barron's Voyage and Joe Henderson's Inner Urge, taken at fast tempos, sight read and then used for improvisation.

It's not that anybody played remotely poorly it's simply that such unfamiliar material could not be treated with the ease required for the group to get on with the kind of full musical discourse to make the most of it. And, except on slower tempos and, in particular, ballads, Garland's muscularly contemporary style did not sit easily with the mainstream/bop approach of the piano. The better performances all belonged to this category Kenny Wheeler's Everyone's Song But My Own and standards such as I Fall In Love Too Easily, My Funny Valentine, You Don't Know What Love Is and the encore, Body And Soul. On these, everybody played particularly well.

Garland is a fine musician, logical no matter how difficult the sequence or how fast the tempo, with a stylistic inheritance which suggests Rollins, Coltrane and Joe Henderson. He was most impressive playing ballads, on which, if anything, his soprano was revealed as even better than his tenor. But the evening's finest moments consistently came from Cleyndert, who was really a class apart.

Well as he has performed on previous visits here, he eclipsed those memories with solo after solo of dazzling technique and persuasive lyricism, notably on his feature, I Fall In Love Too Easily, and My Funny Valentine, which was the high point of the concert.