If ever someone missed out on the silent movie era, it was Bridgewater. She would have been a star with those wonderfully expressive, surprised eyes, suggestive walk and fondness for tableaux.

But it is hard to imagine her keeping quiet for long. Song was just one of a range of vocal gears she employed in her tribute to Ella Fitzgerald; she frequently zoomed from whisper to scat to roar to chuckle in seconds. It was a hair-raising ride that left Bridgewater gasping, not to mention the audience.

"Are you feeling more relaxed now? Just let me know if there's something you need," she purred with a sultry hip-wiggle, having slammed through Gillespie's Night in Tunisia and a couple of Ella numbers, including a Let's Do It, during which she serenaded a listener in the front row.

It was hard to tell whether her band was keeping her in check or egging her on. Thierry Eliez, her musical partner for 10 years, vaulted between piano and organ, sometimes sitting on his foot to give himself greater leverage as he jack-hammered the keys, looking at times like a DJ scratching a track and then, wonderfully, exploding into vaudeville on Basin Street Blues. Bridgewater's own rendition of this Ella standard was playful, gutsy, but too clean to match her heroine's tearing growliness.

Vampiric in her floaty dress and kittenish in her walk, she showed herself a mistress of quick changes, from Eartha Kitt animality to sentimentality (Dear Ella) to a stylish bit of Herbie Hancock-style scat on Love for Sale. The bluesy numbers gave rein to her energy as she trampo lined off vibrant organ sounds, but particularly fine was a quieter new track, Kurt Weill's My Ship.

It seemed at first that the bowed bass accompaniment was too fragile to sustain her resonance, but when Eliez's piano released the tension with cascades of high notes, the audience held its breath at the magic of the moment.