Although jazz instrumentalists sometimes pull rank on jazz singers for having it easy, the reverse often seems to hold - and not only for musical reasons. Lyrics are manipulations of the materials of everyday social exchange; they tempt the performer to come nearer the audience, sometimes to the point of clouding the message, whereas the tumbling patterns bursting from a saxophone infuse personality within the sound, and allow the perpetrator to be a more distant figure.
Jackie Ryan, the formidable jazz vocalist, is in danger of having her gifts overlooked because she maintains exactly the same practical, undemonstrative presence as an instrumentalist. But if she and her trio don't bother with a hard sell and give the impression they'd be playing whether the audience was there or not, her musicality is nonetheless subtle and strong, and her range (within a pretty orthodox blues-and-standards idiom) is often startling.
As Ryan demonstrated on a previous visit here with the same band (Brian Cuomo on piano and Joe Gallivan on drums), she can turn up all the raw power of a big-band blues-shouter when she chooses, as she did with an evocative account of Lonely Woman. At the same time, where some singers can sound self-consciously clever with tricksy, pirouetting jazz, Ryan is light and agile. She exhibits a sonority and pliability of pitch at low registers that recalls the late Betty Carter.
Ryan is as hip as anyone in the business in her timing and sense of space, but has a refreshing indifference to presentational hipness. She described the story of a Jon Hendricks bop song about childhood with a warmth that paid no mind to those late-night inhabitants of jazz clubs who believe that the mention of children is sacrilegious. The sensitive Gallivan on drums and the resourceful Cuomo on keyboards (he often keeps up a left-hand synth bassline whilst rattling through uptempo melodies on the regular piano with the right) give Ryan fine support, but to hear her with a bigger and punchier group would be interesting.
Headlining at the club this week is the saxophonist Barbara Thompson, with an elegant, faintly New Agey and very tautly organised brand of jazz-fusion that sometimes recalls earlier McLaughlin and Jean-Luc Ponty bands. It's melodically a little soupy and tonally a shade classical for some, but drummer Jon Hiseman still sounds like a towering inspiration to anyone who has dreamed of lifting a drumstick.
Until March 18. 0171-439 0747.
