Star rating **** They may have been introduced as a chamber jazz trio but Norma Winstone's accompanists hardly played up to the description, launching into an opening number - a perhaps unlikely union of James Joyce's words with Nearer My God to Thee's melody - with a gusto that threatened to overpower even a singer of Winstone's fortitude.

Star rating ****
They may have been introduced as a chamber jazz trio but Norma Winstone's accompanists hardly played up to the description, launching into an opening number - a perhaps unlikely union of James Joyce's words with Nearer My God to Thee's melody - with a gusto that threatened to overpower even a singer of Winstone's fortitude.

First impressions can lie, though, and what followed illustrated why Winstone is held in great reverence by those who know her work and showed that in Italian pianist Glauco Venier and German soprano saxophonist and bass clarinettist Klaus Gesing, the English singer has found, possibly, the band of her life.

She may quip about getting too old to be tackling too many rigorous numbers but even in her bus pass years, Winstone is an example to any musician. Always ready for new challenges and different directions, she's working here with a repertoire that needs an encyclopaedia to accommodate it. Where else are you going to hear John Coltrane's Giant Steps on tiptoes, Randy Newman given Thelonious Monk's overcoat, Brigadoon, Harry Nilsson, calypso and Italian folksong all sounding so persuasively compatible?

Venier and Gesing, it turns out, are immense, forming a percussion section with Winstone's mouth music, offering a dancey bass clarinet descant here, gentle soprano probings and brilliantly rhapsodic piano there.

One of several inspired segues, wherein Winstone slipped from wordless ballad to a superbly rendered glide through Tom Waits's San Diego Serenade into an Italian equivalent of Flora Purim's intensely rhythmical Brazilian chanting, would have capped a terrific performance, until Winstone led a deathless Every Time We Say Goodbye and broke every heart in the room.