An airline baggage hold-up meant Coco Rouzier had to make do with an evening dress and espadrilles, instead of her full glam rig-out, but the Washington DC-born trouper gave every indication that she has long since packed her singing essentials in her memory bank and could probably turn up for work barefoot in a sack cloth and still turn on the style.

Rouzier is a dues-paying jazz, blues and soul singer from the old school. She sang at New York's famous – some say infamous – Apollo Theatre when she was 19, having won a singing competition at Howard University, and by all accounts cut the mustard, and although a lot of her work around the world since she quit the New York scene after 12 years seems to have been in upmarket resorts and night clubs, she can get down, dirty and downright real with the best of them.

She took the opening Let's Face the Music and Dance in a slow Latin-American metre, making an immediate connection with the audience with the extra relish she conjured at the suggestive tempo, and showed her trouper credentials by rearranging Duke Ellington's Take the A Train on the spot, drawing her trio into her way of thinking like someone pulling on a coat.

A motoring I Got Rhythm and It's Wonderful It's Marvellous, sung as a bossa nova alternating with swingtime, showed great technique and drew fine piano solos from Dave Patrick, but it was the way she luxuriated in The Man I Love's soulfulness and gospelised My Funny Valentine that suggested her growing fanbase here could grow a whole lot more.

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