"Friday's concert at Bryant Park, part of the JVC Jazz Festival, incited two standing ovations, and the groups that provoked them could hardly have been more different. The saxophonist Thomas Chapin set up dance-like ostinatos to improvise over. And Julius Hemphill, a founder of the World Saxophone Quartet (and its most imaginative member), brought his six-saxophone group to the stage for a set of ruminative, lush pieces featuring his distinctive harmonies.

If Thomas Chapin had been an early 20th-century painter instead of a contemporary jazz saxophonist, he would have been a member of the Fauves, that pack of wild French artists, including Matisse and Rouault, whose works simmered with fury, fragmented images and violent colors.

"The old cliché about a musician bursting onto the scene was never more appropriate than for Thomas Chapin's debut UK appearance on Sunday.