Tim Garland is a musician of many parts. As a composer, he has created music for his own groups as well as Chick Corea; as a player, he is now one of the finest practitioners on the bass clarinet, as well as having a peerless control of both soprano and tenor saxophone. His Lighthouse trio, on the other hand, is not just a platform for these talents. It is very much a product of its three integral parts. Gwilym Simcock and Asaf Sirkis are both players with stature and creativity equal to Garland so the combination of the three creates something truly remarkable.

Initially set up to play a set of pieces about British lighthouses - hence the name - the trio now performs work in which the sounds of Spain, South America and the Middle East are added to the Britishness of the original. For this purpose, Sirkis uses a very individual drum kit creating a remarkable variety of sounds. Sirkis is a master at teasing excitement and rhythmic colour out of a minimum of percussion. This leads to some extraordinary passages of interaction between all three players and particularly between Sirkis and Simcock, whose technical prowess allows him to play rhythmically in response to Sirkis and still build fierce melodic passages over the top.

Garland's compositions are long, inventive and wonderfully lyrical. The evening at the Regal began with one of his Spanish pieces, Baco de Sol, with the bass clarinet drawing out a distinctive haunting melody that set the standard. What followed was a whole walletful of rich compositions executed with great energy and imagination.

The evening began with a short but enjoyable set from Barcode, now including Ben Cummings on trumpet. But there was curiously no human presence from the Regal itself. Both bands came on stage and introduced themselves. Tim Garland acknowledged the massiveness of the venture involved in transforming this old cinema into Oxford's latest venue but acoustically it is still somewhat cavernous and it was hard to understand why a jazz audience would want to be distracted by sweeping coloured lights throughout the evening. We were not in danger of falling asleep despite the leather sofas.