Contemporary music concerts contain many strange sights, but never before had I seen music extracted from amplified instruments made of ice. One ice block was tapped by another. Children armed with grins and straws bubbled into water beakers inserted into two other blocks. Dressed for the Arctic, the percussionist Terje Insungset whispered, sang, and bellowed into his shapely ice trumpet. Lena Nymark added haunting vocals of her own against the recorded sound of Norway's ice moving, creaking and groaning.

The performance was short, dimly lit, fun, and powerfully atmospheric: you couldn't ask for a quirkier start to Scene Norway, a blast of Norwegian culture wrapped up in the London Jazz Festival. Electronica aside, this was music from the deep freeze of the distant past or some devastated future - a time when the tools of art are only those that nature gives us. Yet the sounds stayed cheeringly warm and humane. Musically, at least, we have nothing to fear from the Ice Age.

Nor is there any reason to shiver at Arve Henriksen's jazz trumpet, featured with members of the London Sinfonietta and sampling magician Jan Bang which followed. Ensemble members strutted their solo display pieces: a hilarious Hendrix riff from the bassoonist John Orford in Anna Meredith's Axeman, a high wire act from the violinist Charles Mutter (Andrew Toovey's Fast Net). But none could match Henriksen's individuality, whether in his improvisations or the more formal structures of Peter Tornqvist's Crossing Images and the innovative saxophonist Iain Ballamy's newly commissioned Gold Acre.

However, at 35 minutes Tornqvist's drifting musings ran aground some time before journey's end. Ballamy's 20-minute creation presented us with a more intriguing hurdle. How does the ear process a musical wild-goose chase, with the mellifluous, the spiky, the composed and improvised jostled together, gasping for air? Free jazz eruptions suddenly sprouted classical tendrils, to be cut short by the next mad chop of Ballamy's secateurs. If only he'd had an ice instrument to calm himself down.

Scene Norway (020-7520 1490), runs to Nov 22

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