Before the Edinburgh Festival and the merry disorder of its Fringe, the city likes to offer an entertaining support act, which is generally winding down just as the London media are arriving. This year the Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival’s fare ranged from the urbane pianist Dick Hyman via the ineffably cool trumpeter Roy Hargrove to the jazz-punk scream-up of the Thing.

But in a festival dedicated to “home and homecomings”, no performance was more poignant than the return of Joe Temperley, a miner’s son from Fife whose baritone saxophone is described by Wynton Marsalis as “the most soulful sound ever to come out of Scotland”. Temperley left Lochgelly to make his name with Humphrey Lyttelton’s band before moving to New York, becoming a staple first of the Duke Ellington Orchestra and then as the only non-American in Marsalis’s Lincoln Centre Jazz Orchestra.

Now a robust 79, he led a specially formed 16-piece orchestra through an evening of Ellington music and played solos as carefully tailored as his dapper dark suit. We don’t hear enough of the Duke today; he’s not as modish among young jazzmen as Charlie Mingus or Thelonious Monk but, played live, his sophisticated swing can still raise any roof (at the very least this is fine music to dance to).

The set took a stroll through the hits — Take the ‘A’ Train, Rockin’ in Rhythm, Things Ain’t What They Used to Be, C-Jam Blues — all played with huge style. Familiar local jazz figures — the pianist Dave Milligan, saxophonists Bobby Wellins and Phil Bancroft — mixed it with trumpeters Ryan Kisor and Eric Miyashiro from, respectively, Iowa and Japan. Temperley introduced a fiercely talented 17-year-old from the Lincoln Centre programme, Carl Majeau, who soloed on alto sax on Perdido and clarinet on Mood Indigo. It could be a reflection of the state of the jazz economy that he plans to concentrate on physics at college.

While Temperley’s team may have the music of the Duke in their DNA, it’s taken time and a good dollop of money from the Scottish government to bring them together and enable rehearsals (too many promising jazz projects prove underwhelming through lack of preparation time). The band will be back on stage tomorrow at the Queen’s Hall for arguably a greater test: Milligan will unveil a song cycle, Sylvander & Clarinda, about the tempestuous love life of Robbie Burns.

Box office: 0131-473 2000