In a pub across the road, Jonathan Ross and Vic Reeves were making an unannounced appearance in a "punk" band. Very droll - and almost definitely more fun than the protracted noodling session going on at the Jazz Cafe. The south London soul-rap duo Floetry are big in America in a way that must make Robbie Williams weep (nearly 1m album sales, and the likes of Michael Jackson vying to collaborate), but they've paid for it with their Englishness. In its place is the American obsession with technique - the mindset that values aimless diddling over entertainment.

For this reason, perhaps, singer Marsha Ambrosius and rapstress Natalie Stewart are in the can't-get-arrested league back home, despite a surprise Mercury Prize nomination last year. Even with the publicity, though, the Floetic album didn't chart here, and their UK record company has no plans to release the second CD, which they're currently recording. For their first UK dates, therefore, it was the compact Jazz Cafe rather than somewhere with elbow room.

They certainly imposed their presence in terms of volume, which was pitched at maximum throughout. This called your attention - by way of savage squeals and parps - to Ambrosius's super-heated voice and a trombonist whose five-minute solos provoked first incredulity, then despair. This is the way it's done among the soul-jazz crowd with whom they hob-nob in the US (whose doyenne, Angie Stone, was here tonight); it was music long on unstructured flights of jazzery, but short on songs. Occasionally, there was haunting interplay between Ambrosius's vocals and Stewart's kinetic rapping, but there was a veritable lifetime between such moments.

Aware that they're seen by some as having abandoned the British urban scene, the bubbly Stewart took pains to big-up her old stomping ground of London SE5, but she wasn't fooling anyone. How often you can say that an evening would have been better spent with Jonathan Ross in bondage pants?

· At the Jazz Cafe, London NW1, tonight. Tickets: 020-7916 6060.