Before this show started, I paid a visit to the foyer of the QEH’s big sister, the RFH. A free concert by Acoustic Ladyland was in full swing, and the place was packed out. It was a gorgeous sunny day on the South Bank, and yet, hundreds of people were jostling about inside a sweaty space enjoying some raucous punk-jazz. I really hope that by the time it has finished, this Meltdown festival will have demonstrated that the people of London will enjoy some adventurous jazz in a prestigious venue (hello, London Jazz Festival), as well as introducing many more to this exciting – and fun – music. I did my bit by buying a pair of tickets for this meeting of three free jazz veterans, headed up by guitarist Marc Ribot – a man probably most famous to people in this county right now for his guitar solo on Tom Waits’s “Way Down In The Hole” as featured on the opening credits of The Wire. However, this thoroughly entertaining concert was to show a very different side of his musical persona.

The choice of support was pretty inspired. Evan Parker and Han Bennink have both recorded for the ever-fertile Treader label which is run by Spring Heel Jack’s Ashley Wales and John Coxon. Coxon is a member of About with Pat Thomas, Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor, and This Heat’s Charles Hayward, and it was they who opened the show. It was something of a surprise to see Taylor in particular in this format, given the exquisite electro-pop of Hot Chip, even more so when he strapped on an electric guitar to fire off a ragged, if slightly hesitant, solo. Taylor started each piece with his instantly recognisable yearning vocals, and Hayward would shift it up through the gears, with hard double-time metronomic pulse, before they led the piece further “out”. Between these two, Coxon and Thomas’s abstract input on electronics and keyboards was far too quiet; the balance was a lot better when Coxon added some scratchy mathy guitar over Taylor’s keyboards. They did enough in their half-hour slot to suggest that this project could well be an exciting mixture of pop and improv, well worthy of further investigation.

I’m not sure if Marc Ribot, Evan Parker and the impish Han Bennink have ever played before, but the interplay between the three in the ensemble sections was so tight as to suggest that if not, at least a degree of telepathy was involved. They had barely reached their respective spots on stage before Bennink blasted off, with the others scrabbling around to keep up – Parker with huge tenor squawks, Ribot’s guitar spewing out chewed glass. Parker later switched to soprano for a lightning-fast solo, the relentless flurry of high notes sounding like an entire hour long gig recorded and sped up. Ribot’s studious path took him from dense metallic clusters to spindly string scratching to a solo of huge, repeated phrases in a clipped tone reminiscent of that deployed on, well, Frank’s Wild Years or Rain Dogs. The two meshed superbly, at one point Parker deploying some big vibrato while Ribot rocked back and forth intensely on his guitar pedal.

Despite the efforts of these two, this was to end up, perhaps inevitably, as the Han Bennink show. He was on mischievous form tonight, above and beyond his usual antics with towels and feet on drums. He cackled and chanted. He stepped out from behind his kit to play a solo with sticks and feet on the QEH’s floor. He tossed his drum stool at the cymbal. He went for a walkabout round the stage to play percussion on the railings down the side. He hit a cymbal with a stick from a good twenty feet away. He even tossed one at Ribot to end a piece. By the end, he had splayed most of his kit over the floor, leaving himself with just a snare. I’d been to the soundcheck to take some photos, and he wasn’t carrying on quite like this, so I’m not sure the others can have been entirely expecting it (judging by the barely suppressed giggles on Parker’s face, probably not). I’ve rarely laughed as much during a gig; if anyone ever tells me that avant-garde jazz is a cold or overly serious art form – well, anyone who was here tonight would be quick to reject that theory. This was a great show; I just hope Parker and Ribot saw the funny side.