A TRUE free-jazz legend, 75-year old Chicagoan alto saxophonist Anthony Braxton played three nights of standards in the Cafe Oto, with familiar melodies balancing on the sheer cusp of reinvention.

With Californian Steve Davis's empathetic drums, the echoing bass of Neil Charles and the hard-struck, often rampaging piano of Alexander Hawkins, Braxton had his listeners guessing the titles of the tunes he played, so close yet so far were his interpretations.

Suddenly, the quartet went into a galloping, stop-time version of Thelnious Monk's Well, You Needn't, followed by a stomping, blues-struck rendition of John Coltrane's Straight Street and you realised how much a part of jazz tradition this music is and, though full of innovation, love and astonishing discovery, how warmly familiar these tunes are.

At Ronnie Scott's, Havana's burning groove came blazing with the Omar Puente Cuban Sextet, led by the excitation of the Santiago de Cuba-born electric violinist.

“We're going on a journey!” Puente announced and his tunes Morning in Morocco and the Brazil-inspired Samba para Dos began the travelling, through South Africa with Mandela and back to his home town of Bradford with Debbie's One Drop, dedicated to his late wife.

Puente's rampant rhythmic attack made his violin sound like a Caribbean hurricane, while the rolling choruses of Al McSween's piano, Frank Portundo's rocking bassline and the percussive amalgam of Fernando Depestre's drumset, Oscar Martinez's congas and Flavio Correa's bata drums took Cuba along with the sextet to every location of their scintillating excursion.

Back at Cafe Oto the wires, switches, laptops and fizzing circuits of Jean-Marc Foussat's electronic soundscape, hissing and howling, conjured disarray and jeopardy.

The rushing winds of a planet on fire, its trees and living species decimated, burst out of Foussat's sound creation.

Then came the alpha and omega of septuagenarian horn mastery, with Evan Parker's brilliant and birdlike filigreeing soprano and the deep, subterranean rumble of Daunik Lazro's guffawing bass horn.

This was three three veteran jazz-makers at the crossroads, making music for humanity —an endgame of sound imbued with musical meaning and prophecy.