Star rating: **** As befits a drummer-run establishment, the Jazz Bar's autumn season has introduced Edinburgh's jazz audience to some tasty occupants of the kit stool. Earlier in the run, Ulsterman David Lyttle brought his less is more musicality to guitarist Dave Allen's trio. Now we've had the privilege - for such it was - of hearing Washington's Sean Rickman, a player who can be every bit as understated as Lyttle but who also has reserves of energetic creativity, which he releases through more gears than a mountain bike.

Star rating: ****

As befits a drummer-run establishment, the Jazz Bar's autumn season has introduced Edinburgh's jazz audience to some tasty occupants of the kit stool. Earlier in the run, Ulsterman David Lyttle brought his less is more musicality to guitarist Dave Allen's trio. Now we've had the privilege - for such it was - of hearing Washington's Sean Rickman, a player who can be every bit as understated as Lyttle but who also has reserves of energetic creativity, which he releases through more gears than a mountain bike.

Time and again Rickman would power bass guitarist Janek Gwizdala and pianist Oli Rockberger to an apparent peak of gospel-fired delirium, or build a drum break to surely the ultimate intensity, and time and again he'd find another surge or edge dangerously, thrillingly closer to the precipice or find one more outrageous splash cymbal pattern. Oh, and he sings like a lintie, too. It was, to say the least, invigorating, but all the more rewarding for its entirely musical intentions and for not dominating, because Rickman is a mighty talent in a trio of mighty talents.

UK-born Gwizdala is a player from the Jaco Pastorius school, leading from the front with lots of dampened string oomph and terrific use of false harmonics, but he has his own phrasing and staggering command of the fingerboard. If some of the actual material didn't necessarily enthral - Rockberger's soul ballads can be a mite overwrought - this didn't matter because it was where they took it that mattered: along labyrinthine unison lines, into slithery grooves, via rhapsodic piano invention, or on what sounded like a prayer book extension of Miles Davis's Jean-Pierre.