“Jazz living legend comes to Edinburgh,” so we’ve been led to believe. But it’s not easy at all to reconcile the hyperbole with the 68 year-old hobbling on stage. Kitted out in comfy slacks and a winter jumper (and, are those slippers?), saxophonist Pharoah Sanders is pretty slow on his feet these days. And, boy, is he cantankerous to boot. The light is too bright; the monitors are off-kilter. All the signs say that tonight is set up for a slice of nostalgia rather than a slice of the avant-garde; for getting the T-shirt rather than getting with the jazz.

But then the quartet launch into John Coltrane’s modal jazz classic ‘My Favourite Things’, and it’s clear that age has done nothing to slow Sanders’s fingers, or his enthusiasm for performance. Few could have predicted that little under an hour later Sanders would be dancing and scatting in between rapid flurries of notes from his tenor sax. ‘My Favourite Things’ is a scorcher, not the dirge of some of Coltrane’s later recordings, but urgent and engaging.

Indeed, ‘The Pharoah Sanders Quartet plays John Coltrane’ might be a fairly apt title for Sanders’s one-off, six-night tour of the UK. Famed in particular for his collaboration with Coltrane during his final few years, one might have expected to see Sanders attempting to shake off the burden of constant comparison to his revered former colleague.

Instead, Sanders throws off a set consisting almost entirely of Coltrane numbers and does so brilliantly. Balancing lyrical lines with the fast, precise arpeggios reminiscent of the late Coltrane’s “sheets of sound”, Sanders seems on familiar ground. But there’s a real tension in the way he consistently threatens to break into the realms of overblowing and harmonics, of saxophone squeaks and swoops which Coltrane never explored. The second-half opener, ‘Olé’, is pulsating and vital, yet with undertones of violence suggested by Sanders’s squawking instrument. In the same way, though, a rendition of ‘Naima’ seems to hint at beauty too deep for tonality.

Realistically, Sanders was never going to come all the way to Europe without a top rhythm section: Pianist William Henderson also risks comparison to a Coltrane rhythm mainstay, McCoy Tyner. But, while he serves up similar patterns of surging chords, Henderson is far more uninhibited, sending sparkling runs and splashes up the keyboard in a way Tyner never did. Joe Farnsworth on drums is spectacular, though Nat Reeves’s bass, while solid, suffers from ringing and distortion.

The Voodoo Rooms is a great new venue, atmospheric and intimate, but one which perhaps needs to mature as a live performance space. The reverb on Henderson’s piano, for instance, is a touch intrusive at times. One can’t fault, however, the way Sanders’s sax tone is handled by the sound folk: it’s bloody loud, and so it should be. In his transition from a young, radical blower to one of the elder statesmen of jazz Sanders has lost none of the intensity of tone, or of style, which once gained him the title, Pharoah.