Star rating: ***** It's 8.35pm and Jeff Beck goes to work. Not as a waiter in the Starship Enterprise dinette, as his all-white rig-out might suggest, but as the supreme being of the rock guitar instrumental.

Star rating: *****

It's 8.35pm and Jeff Beck goes to work. Not as a waiter in the Starship Enterprise dinette, as his all-white rig-out might suggest, but as the supreme being of the rock guitar instrumental.

This won't be about Beck proving he's the fastest gun in the west, although once or twice he does send his fingers up the fretboard in improbable haste while still making perfect musical sense. For Beck, strapping on his Stratocaster is about touch and finding myriad shades between administering the merest tap and applying a crunching kerrang.

Nothing's overblown. There are no 20-minute solos. Beck may not sing - at least not on stage, where in fact, he barely speaks - but these are song-like portions of music, chosen to provide variety of context from the faintly nostalgic opener, Beck's Bolero to his edgy, itchy take on Nitin Sawhney's modern rock raga Nadia.

His band are thoroughly versed in every arrangement subtlety: the powerhouse drummer Vinnie Colaiuta, who adds tablas to Nadia; keyboardist Jason Rebello, a discreet but valued presence who in another life might have been performing down the road at the jazz festival with former boss Tommy Smith; and Tal Wilkenfeld, who belies her girlish stature with muscly bass guitar lines that sometimes finish Beck's statements for him, sometimes bolster them in unison.

A four-handed bass solo between Beck and Wilkenfeld is the one piece of shameless showbiz in a set that offers a masterclass in digital communication, not least on Angel (Footsteps), where Beck plays goosebump-creating slide guitar and A Day in the Life, where the Beatles' soap opera is delivered as a mini, multi-dimensional electronic epic.