A soft-spoken and pensive man Ornette Coleman is now 65 and has a new record planned for

A soft-spoken and pensive man, Ornette Coleman is now 65, and has a new record planned for release at the beginning of October. By the time he turned his attention to jazz and formed what would become one of the most revolutionary and synchronistic musical projects of the century, he had been paid not to play, had seen an entire blues band stop and leave the stage after just a few bars of his solo, and had even been beaten up by a hostile Southern audience. An unconventional young saxophone player from Texas, Coleman had been bemusing R&B audiences with a strange and individual approach to improvisation. By the mid-1950s, the last murmurs of dissent from jazz's more reactionary quarters had finally died down and modern jazz seemed here to stay And then along came Ornette Coleman. Perhaps a more apt title would be Hammer Dogs, for Perry's mechanised, prefabricated routines are characterised by pulverising noise levels, and have all the subtlety of phrasing you might find during a labourers' tea break.n To 7 October Booking: 0171-278 8916. There may be a place for heavy-footedness in a show like Tap Dogs, but Perry takes it to barbarous extremes. Not that Perry's palette is richly varied; his most common sound patterns being those of horses galloping and a train gathering speed (the latter used to clever, if cliched effect in the back-lit convoy moving slowly downstage, like a locomotive coursing through a tunnel).Elsewhere, he gives you only an unadulterated din, forged and sustained by an ensemble which works on the principle that feet first - or rather feet only - is what tap dance is all about.

Consequently, the upper body is rendered as rigid as the tension wires which stabilise Triffitt's angled set of drawbridges. Andrew Wilkie's muzak comes in fits and starts, a watery accompaniment next to the aural rhythms of the tapping. If anything, the show's a boys' night out in which floppy-fringed lads play at being rough trade. However, if Perry was searching for the perfect concept for his brand of savage and deafening tap, this is it. A team of dancing site-workers, wearing denims, T-shirts, lumberjack shirts and work boots, are sent crashing around on a self-assembly set of integral frames, ladders and platforms, where the chug and thud of each variation piledrives home the men-at-work theme. The opening solo, for a man whose knees peek out of ripped jeans, gives you a hint of the low-level tease factor: a few T-shirts are later removed and, although there's some shameless flaunting of musculature, Perry dodges hen-night entertainment. It also proves that there's still a huge audience for the brawn- not-brains trend established by troupes like the Chippendales and Dreamboys.

Choreographer/ performer Dein Perry and director/ designer Nigel Triffitt created Tap Dogs in Sydney nine months ago and brought it to the Edinburgh Festival last month. Perry's work was recently seen in London in another tap dance production, Hot Shoe Shuffle, and Tap Dogs bears many similarities to that show. It's heavy-handed, everything is painfully over-amplified, and there's little of the spontaneity which tap dance can accommodate so handsomely. Most particularly, it cashes in on the comeback staged by that Nineties species known as unreconstructed man.