Among the few reasons to catch Miles Davis’s bands in those melancholy final years when the great man succumbed to the dubious charms of Marcus Miller was the restless soloing of alto saxophonist Kenny Garrett. If he wasn’t quite as pivotal a presence as the guitarist John Scofield, Garrett still did a reasonable job of overseeing quality control in his department.

In the two decades since then Garrett has consolidated his position in the jazz aristocracy, walking a precariously fine line between post-bop virtuosity and more commercial fusion. The lineup he brought to Soho this week boasted more muscle than usual, the young drummer Justin Brown turning in a prodigious display of controlled power, while the keyboard player Jeff Motley worked away at riffs that sometimes evoked Headhunters-era Herbie Hancock and sometimes drifted farther back to the soulful Hammond organ sound of vintage Blue Note.

Garrett’s blues-based compositions, for their part, had a touch of Grover Washington Jr about them, at least in terms of the airplay-friendly rhythms, yet they also boasted a much more astringent sense of harmony. Yes, romance was occasionally in the air, but cups and saucers, and knives too, were flying around in all directions.

Garrett’s tone was drab at times, a problem not helped by his occasional use of a pedal box that gave his horn a hollowed-out, almost humanoid timbre. There were arid stretches where the musicians vamped at length, the only sense of development coming when the band turned the dial up to ten and a half. Lenny Stalworth’s overlong bass guitar solos added to the bombast, and the leader’s decision to while away some of the time on an extra keyboard made little sense.

Brown’s precise but impassioned contribution made all the difference, giving the band an awesome degree of momentum. At the end of an uncompromising set, Garrett abruptly turned showman with a brazenly over-extended version of the sprightly smooth jazz tune Happy People. The audience, it must be said, loved it.

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