Estelle Kokot, the London-resident South African singer/pianist, sometimes looks surprised to find herself performing, as if she had been sitting at her piano at home and then pulled open the curtains to find an audience there. Yet Kokot is, nonetheless, a powerful, soulful and independent artist whose work seems to need only some occasional final-stage honing.

Kokot played with two fine accompanists: the intonationally precise double-bassist Yaron Stavi and the dynamic American drummer Gene Calderazzo - a trio she calls Ungawa.

Concentrating on original pieces, Kokot visited love, friendship, multi-culturalism and global warming, in a mixture of reflective slow pieces, townships jive and taut funk, often accompanying herself with clipped chords and loosely-swinging countermelodies at the piano. She often became so transported that she would stop playing and weave and wave her arms in a trance-like seated dance.

In hiring two big musical presences on bass and drums, Kokot makes it clear that she wants the rhythmic drive of the music to be a dominant force, though the occasional price is an obscuring of lyrics that deserve more foregrounding than they always get. But her strong and soulful voice cut through both the funky rumble of the rhythm section and the noise of some hysterically supportive fans at the back on her opening feature.

Gene Calderazzo maintained a hypnotically spacey, ticking pulse behind Kokot's voice on the casually rhapsodic See You On Sunday, delivered a whipping hi-hat pattern to kick in Kokot's striking original Love is Not Unique, and swelled to an exultant climax enmeshed with Stavi's darting basslines to wind it up. Kokot's is a personal, unselfconscious, sometimes perplexing talent, but her music is often vividly surprising, and unquestionably all her own.