It's easy to appreciate why some people are so cynical about the number of jazz or jazz-inflected singers competing for attention at the moment. Is it just a marketing craze? Well, yes, it can be, but if the instrumentalists are once again being pushed into the background it is partly because the muscle-bound technocrats among them have done all too thorough a job of scaring off listeners.

The truth is that there is a growing audience for sophisticated music with a strong emotional content, and Melody Gardot, the newcomer from Philadelphia, is ideally placed to cater to it. Reserved she may be, but she already possesses more stage presence than Norah Jones or Madeleine Peyroux, while her compact band boasts stronger jazz credentials than either of her rivals.

While this was a shortish set, lasting only just over an hour, it was a measure of Gardot's confidence that she felt able to play her two strongest cards - the lilting Sweet Memory and her debut album's title tune, Worrisome Blues - so early in the evening. By the time she reached her encore, a lithe version of the Ellington-Tizol standard, Caravan, she had turned the auditorium into the most intimate of jazz clubs.

The voice doesn't span a particularly wide range and the tempos rarely venture beyond slow-to-medium, but she has a thoroughly distinctive taste in material. Her opening number, an audacious a cappella treatment of one of the blues chants unearthed by that tireless musicologist Alan Lomax, was propelled with nothing but fingersnaps and soul. Everyone else is revisiting Tom Waits, but she reminded us that it's still possible to find emotional depths in Bill Withers's Ain't No Sunshine.

Her trio could not be more skeletal, Ken Prendergast's supple bass lines supported by Chuck Patierno's admirably controlled brushwork. Patrick Hughes's unhurried trumpet playing adds the sparest of punctuation. Halfway through, Gardot briefly left the stage while the musicians paid homage to Chet Baker on My Funny Valentine, although she returned in time to supply some suitably bitter-sweet vocals at the end.

The addition of one or two more musicians would bring a few more shades to Gardot's palette. But her own occasional contributions on piano and guitar were beguiling, and when she embarked on Somewhere Over the Rainbow (shades of Eva Cassidy) a hint of bossa nova blended effortlessly with a soupçon of calypso. She already seems an old hand.

Editor's choice

• Desperados with avocados - a sort of Guy Ritchie film
• Live fast, die young: The 27 Club
• Madonna's 50 most memorable moments