Stacey Kent is the name in big type at Ronnie Scott's this week, and the whisper-voiced American expatriate singer is the reason it's likely to be standing room only until Saturday night. For an artist who could write the book on doing more with less, Kent has been on a remarkable roll in recent years - drawing on the audience Diana Krall also has, but expressing her affection for the Broadway songbook and sometimes the soft breezes of samba-jazz in her own way.

But it's worth showing up early, because the first-set trio led by pianist Jonathan Gee shouldn't be missed. Gee was a precociously mature postbop pianist on the British scene a decade ago, but his current band with Steve Rose on bass and Winston Clifford on drums not only represents this inventive pianist's music at its probing best but also provides an edge, bite and surprise to the evening that Kent's restrained dances around a very familiar repertoire and a smooth-jazz ambiance tend to put on the back burner.

Unlike a good many contemporary jazz pianists, Jonathan Gee not only deploys the piano as a propulsive instrument but also as a coaxing and collaborative one, and there were moments in his set on Tuesday when he barely seemed to touch the keys but released ripples that silenced the crowded room, a hypnotic effect reminiscent of the late Bill Evans. In uptempo Latin mode, Gee varied his phrase-lengths shrewdly and bounced ideas off his closely-attentive partners, but the trio was unfazed by the challenge of taking the dynamic level very low - and unlike Stacey Kent, doing it within stories for which the audience could not anticipate the endings. The group's long, open finale, with the pianist tantalisingly releasing fragments of phrases, allowing Winston Clifford to pick up the implications with subtle brushwork and then transform the piece with amiably devious scatting (Clifford is a fine singer, a skill he mostly keeps in the closet), brought a crowd that hadn't come to hear this band close to rapturous applause.

Stacey Kent and her musicians stepped elegantly through a standards repertoire - and, as ever, the singer wrongfoots the hardcore jazzer's doubts with an understated musicality that comes directly from jazz inspirations, and saxophonist Jim Tomlinson and pianist Dave Newton provide plenty of polished swing. But the breezy elegance can make you hanker after some more contradictory emotions - though Kent's disconsolate whisper in Say It Isn't So did come briefly close.

· Stacey Kent's band and the Jonathan Gee Trio are at Ronnie Scott's until Saturday.