Collisions of innovative art-music and edgy popular forms are hardly breaking news in a contemporary jazz scene so often influenced by hip-hop, but if much of Led Bib’s non-jazz input came from an earlier era – Zappa, Captain Beefheart, Grateful Dead, punk – the mix has gone on evolving, as the sax-squalling, groove-thundering 2009 Mercury nominees are proving on their comeback from a long layoff, launching their new album, Umbrella Weather.

Led Bib have always liked fast scene-changes, and they swept through plenty at Kings Place. Stamping rock grooves and staccato hooks would stop dead for softly inquisitive sax speculations before expat American drummer/leader Mark Holub kicked the group toward boiling melees. Spooky synth bleeps were embraced by breathy slow figures from Pete Grogan and Chris Williams’s alto saxes, warm horn harmonies unfolded over electronic chugging like distant steam-trains, and virtuosic bass guitarist Liran Donin’s old-school rock-bass twangs, flamenco-like strumming, and precisely looping countermelodies were a constant spur. The sax players were sometimes tentative despite the intensity of the undertow in the first half, but blossomed in the second – notably in Grogan’s delicate handling of two hauntingly folksy episodes, Williams’s Ornette Colemanesque zigzags, Holub’s melodic cymbal flutters against the attentive Toby McLaren’s diaphanous synth chords, and a free-jazz clamour that acquired a highlife bounce in the encore.

The jump-cutting bordered on the disorientating at times, but Led Bib have certainly come back with a bang – or more accurately, a machine-gun barrage of bangs.

• At the Bell Inn, Bath, 20 February. Then touring.