Kurt Elling was introduced tonight as one of the great jazz voices of the 21st century, yet with his slicked-back hair and boxy brown suit, he looked like one of the great jazz voices of the 1940s. But there is nothing else remotely retro about Elling. His shows have the pacing, contrasts, impassioned soliloquies, dry asides and all-round narrative shape of a well-written play, expertly performed.

He was quick to lead applause for the UK's Claire Martin, who had delivered an assured, fine-tuned first set with her inventive trio. Martin's intriguing choices (Michael Franks' Jive, Funny Girl's The Music That Makes Me Dance and Sting's St Augustine in Hell all rubbed shoulders), and the control with which she switched from a deep purr through an evaporating whisper to coolly loping swing, confirmed how steadily this long-standing local class act continues to grow.

Elling and his influential pianist/arranger Laurence Hobgood then took the gig into another realm. Familiar songs began, turned into other songs or maybe a poem by Rilke, then reappeared to indicate the cutting and pasting of all kinds of material, old and new, to make a completely fresh jazz singer's repertoire. Sweeping from a Sinatra-like sensuous baritone to a chorister's high notes, Elling delivered his spine-tinglingly slow account of the Irving Berlin classic Change Partners over Hobgood's brooding three-chord riff. He whooped through Betty Carter's Tight in a here-and-gone flash, filled the hall with just his own lazily curling notes and Rob Amster's bass for Rilke's The Waking, and introduced some sampled vocal choruses to make a roaring climax on his Pat Metheny finale.

The light relief, in the form of a jokey jazz-jive Lord Buckley Shakespeare speech, didn't sit entirely happily with him. But the show was a tour de force, and the audience stood to acknowledge it.