On paper this looked like a curious event. Two jazz quartets, one from Lyon the other from Pretoria, playing to the accompaniment of, or accompanying, photographs of South Africa by the German Jurgen Shadenburg. In reality the question as to who was accompanying what became irrelevant as both the music and the photographs where individually so strong and collectively coherent to create an event of remarkable intensity.

Heavy Spirits, from Pretoria, began the proceedings with a piece that laid the ground for the music to come. Tight offbeat percussion riffs underlaid by looser bass lines and a relatively uncomplex melody from sax and trumpet played in dense harmony that gave surprising depth and weight. After a piece from Le Workshop de Lyon, revealing a highly accomplished quartet with feet in both the rhythms of Africa and the free improvisation idioms of Europe, the two quartets played together in semi-darkness for the rest of the evening while Shadenburg's turbulent photographs were projected on to a screen behind. The photographer said that the South Africa he found in the 1950s was a culturally divided country, with the black population keenly embracing new directions in music, fashion and art while the whites seemed stuck in a time warp of traditions and restrictions - which of course soon coalesced into the straightjacket of apartheid. In this sense, the photographs had a narrative that moved from exuberant dance halls to the horrors of a police state and then out into freedom under Nelson Mandela, by which time the work changes from black and white to more all-embracing colour and short movie clips.

The music, which did at times reflect the photography, nevertheless had a strength and spirit of its own and took the audience on a parallel journey sometimes filling the hall with sounds reminiscent of Abdullah Ibrahim and at others moving into areas of free improvisation that worked cunningly at a tangent to the photography. Though the whole performance was precisely timed, there was nevertheless some great solo work from Jean-Paul Autin on sopranino and Gershwin Nkosi on trumpet, while throughout the drumming of Garland Selolo of Heavy Spirits was magically sharp and driving. This was also the last leg of a European tour and an event brought to Oxford by the Jacqueline du Pré in conjunction with Oxford Contemporary Music.