As the keyboard player of choice for Norma Winstone, Steve Colman and Courtney Pine, Robert Mitchell has to be good, but it was a surprise to discover at the Spin just how good and how different. As a member of the F-IRE collective and leader of his own band, Panacea, Mitchell is both in demand and busy writing, arranging and recording his own music. This is not at all easy to categorise and is all the more powerful for that. Pulling on jazz traditions from the deep South through to today's European scene, hip hop and adding in a knowledge of modern classical back to Baroque, Mitchell creates music that doesn't allow the listener to sit back and relax into familiarity.

The melodies in Panacea sung by vocalist Deborah Jordan, rather than being the upbeat snappy tunes that make up the backbone of jazz standards, were songs dominated by extended passages broken up by short upbeat sections throughout, which Jordan's voice was being used like a solo horn rather than the warm, female sounds one might expect. This was at first unsettling, particularly as the sound balance between vocal and keyboard was a bit out, so that Jordan's voice often seemed to be unnecessarily harsh. In the second half, in a scat version of the familiar Footprints, with the balance corrected, the depth and wonderfully individual expression of her voice became clear.

Mitchell's solos were nevertheless the high points of the evening. His virtuosity allows him to use the keyboard as if it were an instrument of many tongues whose languages he speaks with equal ease. Throughout the evening, there was no way of knowing what route he would take, what musical colours he would paint, what soundscapes he would invent. Although there was aspects that appeared and reappeared, there was rarely the sense of repetition, and the rhythm and drive that enlivened even the simplest phrase was the mark of a real talent. With Richard Sparen's forceful angular drumming and Tom Mason's solid yet imaginative bass, the second half of the evening was a window into what jazz can be in the hands of rich new talent.