Trumpeter Chris Botti is a smooth operator. He has a smooth, bittersweet tone on his instrument. He's a smooth talker. And he makes "smooth jazz" records, many of them closer to instrumental pop than jazz. Yet he tells us it was a boyhood encounter with a Miles Davis recording that inspired him to become a musician; perhaps a half-week at Ronnie's will reveal his jazz soul.

Like Davis, Botti plays standards such as What'll I Do?, the love theme from Cinema Paradiso and Good Morning Heartache, caressing their melodic curves as if they were porcelain. He performs a couple of pieces that Davis made his own: My Funny Valentine and Flamenco Sketches, which, as he points out, comprises five chords and no melody - the improvisers create everything else.

Botti has picked up an important tip from studying Davis's career: the art of hiring the best sidemen. The latest addition to Botti's super-talented band is pianist Billy Childs, a Grammy-winning leader in his own right. Like all good composers, Childs can do a lot with very little, and he soon tears up the club with his two-handed, rapid-fire solo on When I Fall in Love.

Drummer Billy Kilson is similarly impressive, playing everything from fragmented, spacey funk to breakneck jazz time. Arrangements that start in schmaltzville become hip once Kilson gets to work, adding decorative touches to the jazz-funk-lite of Good Morning Heartache or the Head Hunters-style groove of Leonard Cohen's A Thousand Kisses Deep. The hollowness in Botti's recorded music is fleshed out by his superb musicians: the band supersedes the bland.

There's an embarrassing interlude when Botti mentions that the band played the White House last Sunday, provoking boos and hisses from the audience. He switches quickly to some light anti-Bush banter: "George knows less about jazz than that lampshade!" while the band improvises a Texan pastiche. Hardly Dixie Chicks, but Botti looks relieved to have smoothed out the situation.