It was a little more than Monday-night quiet in Soho this week, but even a sparsely attended Ronnie Scott's makes a lot of noise when Diane Schuur is in the house. The blind, self-taught singer-pianist from Washington combines a show-singer's drama and attention to lyrics with a nightclub artist's playful informality. And a sharper jazz sensibility that she's sometimes given credit for adds an attractive looseness to the proceedings, even if it's a more organised looseness than it appears.
Schuur has brought a lively, straightahead accompanying trio with her, featuring the Barney Kessel-like guitarist Rod Fleming. The American's group plays opposite UK bass virtuoso Arnie Somogyi's contemporary quartet, which assumed the tough task of offering Schuur's mainstream audience a repertoire of unpredictable and occasionally faintly solemn post-Coltrane originals. The engagingly dry tone and fresh phrasing of saxophonist Paul Booth, and Somogyi's full-bodied sound and subtle timing, helped give the music an understated authority, and an account of Wayne Shorter's Tom Thumb was both a creative collective exercise and a reminder of how waywardly personal yet lyrical a composer Shorter has always been.
Diane Schuur's musicians played a businesslike instrumental on East of the Sun, West of the Moon, before the singer was ushered on to whoops and cheers, and cruised into her theme song, a rolling mid-tempo blues celebrating her nickname, Deedles. The song got some Schuur party-pieces out of the way at the outset, like the declamatory pure-toned sound she eventually rips aside with a banshee soul-falsetto, and the scat-singing duets she performs with her own piano lines or her partners. Schuur's high-class-pop approach to a good ballad was evident on The Man I Love (though the honeyed synthesised-strings effect was maybe a sentiment too far), and her jazz awareness sharply honed on conversations with guitarist Fleming.
Stevie Wonder got the salsa treatment without sacrificing the exultant soulfulness, and a fine drummer, Reggie Jackson, delivered a scalding solo on It Don't Mean A Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing that started out right inside the song, blew a volcanic eruption all over it, and then fell back to a smouldering aftermath as if nothing had happened.
· Until Saturday. Box office: 020-7439 0747.
