SOME of Britain’s finest and most audacious improvising musicians were in their own liberated zone at this gig.

Dubbed If Herbie Went West Coast by electronics wizard Phil Durrant, this session recalled an era when Herbie Hancock made his Crossings and Sextant albums and created an epochal rendezvous of acoustic and electronic sounds.

Durrant’s electric beat, generated by an array of switches, wires, modular synthesiser and plugs, combined with Mark Sanders’s pulsating drums and John Sanders’s plunging bass and fomented a pounding rhythmic vibration, while Pat Thomas — switching between iPad sonics and fervent piano runs — deepened the excitation.

But it was the dexterous, all-woman horn triumvirate, blowing with sheer power and inventiveness which made the room shake with joy.

Sarah Gail Brand’s trombone, lithe and free,  seemed to be reinventing itself, her slides growling and exclaiming as if she were part of a New Orleans street parade.

Rachel Musson’s tenor saxophone quivered and gasped with contemporary blues next to Edwards’s palpitating strings, while Charlotte Keeffe’s blood-red, rasping flugelhorn and trumpet blew breathy cadences and messages as if her lungs were burning with an electricity all of her own.

Durrant’s assertion that the intention of the session was to recall “those heady times when electronic and acoustic instruments were being explored in a live improvisation environment for the first time,” was no expression of jazz nostalgia.

Here was intense contemporary music with powerful uplift and a rhythmic soundscape of the earth and the city in the cosmopolitan heart of Hackney.