Dave Higgins Quintet, Jazz Café, London

When jazz ruled the dancefloor...

It is axiomatic that jazz ceased to be popular music with the emergence of bebop, and that although they still continued tapping their feet to it, people stopped dancing to jazz after the war when most of the big bands folded. Yet mostly unknown to the outside world, there has been a thriving jazz dance scene in London for many years, originally at Dingwalls in Camden, then at the old Blue Note in Hoxton (with Snowboy on the decks), and now at the Jazz Café. Banish images of flappers in cocktail dresses, this is hardcore exercise. Athletic types perform super-charged Gene Kelly-style routines to anything from Milestones to hardcore Art Blakey to uptempo Tony Bennett, or unbelievably fast sambas to clattering percussion tracks, the squawks and tom rolls accompanied by virtuoso solo displays on the dancefloor. The great American singer Mark Murphy even wrote a song about discovering it on trips to London.

Dave O'Higgins has captured the sound of this scene admirably with his new album, Fast Foot Shuffle, a project produced by Perry Louis of the JazzCotech Dancers. Unfortunately, the Jazz Café wouldn't pay them to perform, so tracks written specifically for Louis's troupe had to be heard without their presence, although there was plenty of jazz dance footwork going on during the course of the evening.

O'Higgins joked before he went on that there were going to be more notes in an hour than were legally allowed, and he was true to his word. The tempi were never slower than medium fast – some ferocious. Dizzy Gillespie's "Bebop" was taken at a speed I would call brave, were it not for the fact that O'Higgins's tenor sax tore into it with the virtuosity of a Brecker, while I felt quite sorry for the double bassist during "Caravan". Playing four in a bar at that rate of knots is tough on the fingers. "North Station" was an authentic mixture of Sixties wah-wah guitar alternating with swing, with a double time Latin coda. "Sludge Pump" was the perfect encore, a greasy, car-mechanic, roll-your-oily-sleeves-up outing of jazz funk.

O'Higgins and his pianist, Tom Cawley, are superb players. At the risk of causing dissent in the band, I would say that they were in a different class to the rest of the musicians who, while good, need to project themselves more. Cawley provided several furious, commanding displays, but O'Higgins, well – does he know just how good he is? When it comes to bop of any kind, on either soprano or tenor saxophones, he is, live, one of our few world-class players, capable of holding his own with the Americans. O'Higgins wouldn't be out of place standing in for Bob Berg in a line up of Steps Ahead that included Jeff "Tain" Watts and Joey Calderazzo. I hope he does take that place some day, because if he doesn't swim with the big fish he might not realise that he's one of them, too.