Claire Martin is such an honest and unaffected performer that the coy sentimentalities of some old standard songs can seem like a foreign language to her. And though she can be a fine singer on the best of those familiar materials, Martin has often handled the contradiction between their past and her present by singing plenty of contemporary material too.

But recently Claire Martin put out the CD Too Darn Hot!, largely a collection of the usual Broadway suspects, and seemed to have reached a new phase in the balance between her genially offhand personality and the performer's need to play a part. Some of the material from Too Darn Hot! (Martin's best and most ambitious disc in a long time) appeared in her repertoire for three nights at the Pizza on the Park, accompanied only by the pianist Dave Newton.

Newton is an effortless, polished pianist, with deep roots in the urbane pre-bebop piano style of keyboard artists such as Teddy Wilson, and he is a superb accompanist for singers. Newton supplied Martin with a steady stream of stealthily walking basslines, emphatic chording, prancing, silvery melody and sympathetic dynamic variation.

The material, the setting and the instrumentation led Martin toward her jazziest techniques, and she indicated how effectively she has her head and her vocal cords around the throwaway acrobatics of Ella Fitzgerald's scat singing style. Her pitching was confident and sure however audaciously she spontaneously bends the melody, and she skidded around They Can't Take That Away From Me with casual aplomb - though maybe the percussive tripling of the word "bumpy" was a reinvention too far.

Martin performed three songs by Rupert Holmes in succession, to give a contemporary centrepiece to her performance - moving from raunchy soulfulness to wistful reflection, and then to the satire on middle-class mores, Partners In Crime. The latter confirmed how well the singer delivers complex and ironic lyrics without her jazz sensibilities overpowering the meanings.

Then she went back to Broadway and performed When I Fall In Love, dead straight. It was Martin at her most candidly tender. Dancing Cheek to Cheek got a mild ironic spin and a superb solo of teeming runs and clamouring counter-melodies from Newton. Too Darn Hot! was a game with the audience. Martin invited the crowd to provide the percussion by finger-snapping on the two and four, then peppered the song with conversational asides that never dropped a stitch in the tempo. A fine singer who is still growing.