During the course of this, the first gig of his week-long residency at Dean Street, John Etheridge offered to sell the audience his guitars and his snazzy shirt, before announcing the "grand finale" of his unaccompanied set as "well, not all that grand, don't get too excited". It would be hard to imagine an American guitarist of Etheridge's skills so resolutely under-selling himself. But what you get with this engaging London-born performer (or maybe anti-performer) is the unpackaged human being - but one who happens to be able to play the daylights out of a guitar in almost any style.

Etheridge will be spending the week exploring all the music he loves, from Django Reinhardt's Gypsy swing, to straightahead jazz, to African music and blues, as well as the Frank Zappa and Soft Machine legacies - he played for years with the former Django Reinhardt violinist, Stéphane Grappelli, and with later editions of Soft Machine.

The sweep across all that music began with a Charlie Parker bop exploration, and a blues-inflected account of Charles Mingus's Goodbye Pork Pie Hat. He grew a Cameroonian dance tune by Francis Bebey out of the latter, and duetted with his own sampled bassline on Bebey's breezy Guitar Makossa.

Etheridge was playing alone, but he introduced the five guitars and two chairs as part of the act. A chiming electric sound allowed him to impart driving swing to a standards episode, and on acoustic he beautifully caught Django Reinhardt's singing tone on the classics Limehouse Blues and Chinaboy. Tennessee Waltz was a skewed-chords reverie, and when he was asked if he knew any Elvis Presley, Etheridge played Love Me Tender, and turned it into the John Lewis/Modern Jazz Quartet classic, Django. No self-deprecation could take away from the magic of it.

· John Etheridge plays with Zappatistas at the Pizza Express Jazz Club, London, tonight, and with Arild Andersen and John Marshall on Thursday and Friday. Box office: 020-7734 3220.