When trapeze artists edge out on to the high wire, an undercurrent of the magic is that this might be the night it doesn't work. Something similar happens when the American vocalist Sheila Jordan, now 74 (and not shy of mentioning it),takes the stage at Ronnie Scott's.
The room always seems too big and the punters too absorbed in their own lives for her private and secretive singing style to overcome the static. Then, after an hour has passed, it becomes apparent that all ears are tuned to her.
Jordan is back at Ronnie Scott's this week with the same local trio she worked with two years ago (Nick Weldon on piano, Jeff Clyne on bass, Trevor Tomkins on drums) and many of the same tunes - but the familiarity emphasises rather than obscures the singer's ingenuity as an improviser. The sidelong Humdrum Blues is a favourite with her, and she set it up on Monday by enquiring solicitously of each of her accompanists if they had the blues. She confirmed that it is a universal condition, with an upside as well as a downside, before softly whooping her way into a mid-tempo groove. If I Should Lose You was a throwback to Jordan's most famous fan, Charlie Parker, since the original inspiration for her account of it - which eased between quirky Latin and suspended-animation reverie, bordering on private worship - was a Parker interpretation of the song.
Jordan often inserts a scat episode; she sounds like a different artist when she does it, disappearing into a yodelly, low-register trance with her eyes closed and the microphone clutched close, as if she were speaking in tongues. Weldon exhibited the restraint and balance that often marks his work, and his dialogues with his partners (particularly Clyne's purring bass sound) occasionally suggested the late John Lewis and the rhythm section of the Modern Jazz Quartet. On Tom Harrell's Buffalo Wings, Jordan cut the melody adrift from the chords so boldly that following it felt like trying to negotiate an unfamiliar staircase in the dark.
The strongest features of the set, though, were a compelling dedication to Don Cherry (Jordan rhythmically squealing with laughter in mid-solo at a missed cue with her partners), a lurchingly lyrical rumination on Kenny Dorham's Fair Weather and a fusion of standard-singing and native-American chant on Paul McCartney's Blackbird. "You were only waiting for this moment to be free," Jordan half-whispered to the room. Most of her moments seem to feel like that
· Until Saturday. Box office: 020-7439 0747. Then touring.
