AT SOHO’S Pizza Express, Eddie Gomez, Puerto Rican-born bassist of the Bill Evans Trio and a Dizzy Gillespie alumnus, dug into a veteran’s groove with his swinging Italian bandmates.

His springing, resonant strings bounced into Cheeks, his tribute to Gillespie and the beautifully etched, deeply throbbing melodism of the lingering tune Ariana stayed long in the mind.

Among the host of tomes in Foyles’s West End bookshop, saxophonist Binker Golding and pianist Elliot Galvin played together with such an intimacy it’s as if both musicians were inside each others’ instruments, so telepathic was their improvising union.

Golding’s pointillistic, viscerally filigreeing notes on both tenor and soprano horns found fusion with Galvin, playing almost as much inside his piano, striking and caressing its internal strings as his rampaging runs up and down its open keys. It was as if an audience of a multitude of engrossed books were all listening.

Cafe Oto in Dalston rocked to the Dresden drumming of Gunter Baby Sommer, duetting with the Scottish alto saxophonist Raymond MacDonald.

The 76-year-old Sommer, whether pummelling with his mallets on a long wooden box, kneeling on the stone floor and striking the bottoms of saucepans with iron hammers or sitting at his drum set as a percussionist of all surfaces and seasons, provoked a powerful excitation.

As for MacDonald, it was as if he couldn’t help creating new and spontaneous melodies from every line of improvisation, so inventive were his notes and phrases.

They are indeed a duo of magnetic sound — European brothers of huge musical energy.