The Spin was packed well before he came on, with a nice mixture of the middle-aged, like me, who remember the pioneering jazz rock guitarist of Soft Machine, and the young, who’d heard that he was the great performer. In the first solo, he shifted up effortlessly through the musical gears, relentlessly piling on the excitement. After that, he began to warm up. By the end, at the anti-European hour of 11:00pm, he seemed capable of going on all night, and the audience certainly wanted him to. All this was entirely predictable. This was the fourth time I've seen him do it in Oxford in the space of three years.

Somewhere inside his head there’s a place that just generates music – all kinds of music. At the Spin, we heard straight ahead jazz, jazz rock, more abstract ECM-style musings, passages of free-jazz and down-home blues. There's more. Etheridge has recorded with Stephane Grappelli, and at Brecon this year he led a Frank Zappa tribute band. A support band is useful, but not essential. After the interval, he captivated the audience with a free-wheeling solo number. But he also clearly got a kick out of playing with the band. And when somebody requested “Kind of Blue”, which is a whole album, not one number, he gave a quick-time musical precis of all the five pieces. About the only thing he can't do, as he revealed in the encore, was to sing the blues with a plectrum in his mouth.

To support John Etheridge, musicians have to be relaxed about being overshadowed, but the Spin trio – Pete Oxley on guitar, Mark Doffmann on drums and Phil Scragg on bass- did themselves credit. Oxley did a fine solo on Green Tea, as did Scragg, and Doffmann was always alert to Etheridge’s fluid musical thinking. Like the rest of us, I guess, they were just happy to be there.

Roger van Schaick