Moving between entrance, auditorium, bar and lavatory also felt like being participating in an art installation. It seemed that rooms changed size and position at will, that doors led to different other rooms each time I went through them (lucky I didn't end up in the Ladies). At one point I was walking past a veritable feast - salads, etc. - on a table, in what turned out to be the band's dressing room. And one kept finding oneself striding through conceptualist art films about decomposing endangered species. Returning to all the good old-fashioned modernism in the actual auditorium felt quite a relief after all of that.

And whaddya know - Westbrook's music (coming on to it at last) fitted perfectly into this place that has turned disorientation into style. The suite that took up most of the first half, entitled The Waxeywork Show, features lyrics by singer and wife Kate Westbrook about macabre Victoriana, which gets related to the internet. Sumptuously sinister. On the sleeve notes of the album, Clare Blake claims that ‘daringly creative, Mike's complex freefall arrangements partner Kate's edgy lyrics in a compelling dialogue between voice and brass that jolts us out of our comfort zone.'

Well, yes and no, Clare. Mike's arrangements were indeed complex and freefall, as creative and as satisfying as ever. But the effect was ultimately one of sophisticated good taste rather than anything really threatening. For not merely were there a lot of people in the audience, but they all looked very intelligent - lots of beards, waistcoats, thoughtful expressions etc. If crowds were measured not by pedestrian means but by an aggregate of IQs, this would be the equivalent of a sell-out at Wembley Stadium. I think such people have lived a bit, Clare; I think they can handle a touch of freefall and disquiet; I don't think their comfort zones are quite as limited as all that. (I rather enjoyed being bamboozled by the spatial peculiarities in the interval really.) In other words, the touch of anarchy in Westbrook's music that excited cultural radicals such as Jeff Nuttall around 1970 no longer seems very threatening. Nowadays one could even incorporate it within the pleasant. Rather like with those old ‘modernist' masterpieces.

Yet for an evening's upmarket entertainment this was great. The players (trumpet, trombone, tenor and alto sax), all handpicked from Westbrook's native Devon, and all dressed in black (maybe clothes shops offer a limited range out west), performed excellently to a note, with solos being particularly thrilling. The second half of the show, unoriginally entitled All That Jazz, featured many covers by old jazz masters - Jelly Roll Morton, Thelonius Monk, Charles Mingus, Bessie Smith. It wasn't cutting edge, it was just good.

A final word in your ear: drinks aren't available at these Kettles Yard shows until half-time. So, if you're going along, why not loosen up liquidly beforehand at an agreeable local hostelry such as the Castle Inn or the County Arms. Maybe if I'd done that myself, my disorientation-comfort zone relationship levels would have been quite different.

Writer: Rychard Carrington