Seduced by Melody Gardot in a night of sweet inspiration

Melody Gardot ****
Voodoo Rooms

IT'S 9.35pm on a busy Sunday night. It's so warm inside the Voodoo Rooms' Ballroom that breathing space is hard to come by. A waitress carrying three dinner plates from the nearby kitchen skilfully manages to avoid the various arms and elbows as she navigates her way through the crowd. She's clearly done this before.

Meanwhile, as some punters impatiently check their watches, a flicker of long blonde hair emerges from out of the gloom. Dressed in a dark, slinky dress, the shadowy figure gingerly makes her way to the stage, puts down her cane and begins clicking her fingers, whispering gently into the microphone with all the seductiveness of the Cadbury's Caramel bunny.

A sudden hush falls over the Ballroom; people are so entranced by what they're hearing, the chink of ice-cubes is almost deafening. Welcome to an evening with Melody Gardot.

Largely unheard of until a recent career-enhancing appearance on Later with Jools Holland, it's a wonder this delightfully charming singer-songwriter from Philadelphia is even here at all.

A piano-bar player at the tender age of 16, Gardot never harboured any intentions of becoming a full-time musician until a road accident at the age of 19 left her with serious head, back and pelvic injuries.

Forced to spend a year in rehab, her doctor suggested writing songs in the hope it would reconnect the neural pathways in her brain. Today, she's a rising star on the brink of achieving commercial success.

Now 23, Gardot still suffers pelvic pain, headaches and sensitivity to light. It means having to carry a cane, wear tinted glasses and take a Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulator unit with her on her travels, to block pain signals to her brain. Yet not once did Gardot mention her condition throughout 75 minutes of light, jazzy, breathtaking charm.

Backed by an effective minimalist ensemble featuring double bass, drums and trumpet, the main theme of Gardot's songwriting is centred in emotions of the heart: love.

"All I want is somebody to love me like I do," she pleads on Quiet Fire, prior to picking up the guitar. You half-expect her to start lazily strumming a few basic chords, but no; embarking instead on a series of elastic hand-stretching jazz chords proving, like her cane and light-sensitive specs, that her guitar is no prop.

Some tracks are delivered in a rhythm not unlike black prison songs of the early 20th century. Indeed, Gardot is quick to encourage her audience to look up the works of musicologist, Alan Lomax, who recorded so many early blues songs from the American cotton fields.

Gardot also has a fully developed sense of humour, as her questioning of the Loch Ness Monster's existence managed to demonstrate.

Her brisk, up-tempo version of Somewhere Over The Rainbow is as good an advancement on this classic tune as you will ever hear, and if anyone doubted her credentials as a bona fide artiste, then her ode to Duke Ellington following a well-deserved encore sealed it with a loving kiss.

Then that was it. With cane in hand, the elegant and simply divine Melody Gardot thanked her audience one last time before carefully making her way backstage.

She might not have the most recognisable name in music right now. However, by the end of the summer, there's a strong possibility Gardot's album, Worrisome Heart, will provide the soundtrack to many a dinner party.