Benjamin Britten often demonstrated a particular sureness of touch when working within a smaller frame. Limitations of scale, in fact, could fire him up and send him off in fascinating directions - as with the creation of the first of his "church parables", Curlew River, premiered in 1964. Britten looked a long way east for the inspiration for the piece. Then his eagle eye spots a trendy punter toward the back of the crowd wearing a T-shirt bearing the post-ironic slogan "Kill All Artists". Considering Zimbabwe is a country where such statements - when made - are probably meant, it's impressive to witness Albert's response, delivered through, I'd like to think, gritted but grinning teeth: "You may be able to kill us, but you cannot kill our words or spirit."This is the turning point, as a won-over audience finally get to their feet to do the grape-treading dance so favoured by the reluctant hoofer And the children loved it.. His full-blooded trumpet style, confident presence and superior rapping and vocal abilities brought the whole show to life Truly, Charlie Parker had found his Dizzy Gillespie.

They ended, comically if frustratingly, free-styling on the subject of "Weetabix", a topic suggested by the audience.. "Welcome to Zimbabwe!" , booms Albert Nyathy, self-proclaimed "dub poet" and Imbongi's leader. "You are here to dance, isn't it?" The laid-back London crowd of commuters and mothers with children are unimpressed, being more inclined to recreate Seurat's La Grande Jatte on this sunny early evening than get up and boogie. We are sitting on a bristly square of faux-grass watching an African band in faux-animal skins, wondering who is exploiting whom. And what is "dub" about Imbongi is never made apparent - they are essentially a fairly generic, guitar- and keyboard-driven Highlife band with a strong influence of township jive. Pretty soon Albert gets a sense of his audience and drops the Lion King "chattering monkeys and laughing hyenas" stuff in favour of meditations on his discomfort at American domination of Zimbabwean youth. Although Kinch has received a lot of praise and won a few awards already, as a player he's not really there yet: what we're applauding is the hope of what he might become. His tone is uninflected and relatively unformed, and his compositions, while remaining interesting, don't have a lot of meat on the bone.

But, stubbornly, Kinch holds on to a vision of what he thinks jazz is about, and he's evolving a kind of language that brings to mind the post-bop experiments of Eric Dolphy and Booker Little, as well as the more recent example of Steve Coleman, in a way that reflects the here and now of contemporary British society very effectively.When the New Orleans-born trumpeter Abram Wilson came out to join Kinchfor the last few numbers, everything went up a gear. But maybe because of the setting, or because a trumpeter rather than a sax-man was leading the band, the project appeared to miss the point of Parker almost entirely. Bebop's blood, sweat and tears of emotional turbulence had been exchanged for the tranquil recollections of repertory-jazz.The performance of the young English alto saxophonist Soweto Kinch later that afternoon at the Theatr Brycheiniog had - on the face of it - nothing to do with Charlie Parker at all, yet it came a lot closer to suggesting his mercurial power and frustrating intransigence. What imitation, or dull obeisance, fails to capture is the sheer science-fiction modernity of it all: the shock of the blue. And so it proved with the Charlie Parker Legacy Band, an amiable-enough quintet put together by the hot-shot trumpeter John Faddis, who was barely more than a baby when Parker popped his brogues. With the suitably bluesy Jesse Davis taking the Bird role on alto saxophone, and veterans Jimmy Cobb (who played on Kind of Blue) on drums and Ronnie Matthews on piano, it was a good solid band, and the arrangements of originals such as "Parker's Mood" kept true to the spirit of the music. One scoop here (costing £1.50) is the equivalent of two elsewhere.Sitting outside and eating a lychee sorbet, I wonder if small artisan ice-cream shops could open across the country, in much the same way as coffee shops first did back in the 1990s.