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However unlikely, it still sounded great.Although the show always remained close to shambolic, there was strength in depth. At one point, the machine played Miles Davis’s theme from Lift to the Scaffold while Gelb and John Parrish, on drums, were engaged on a different tune entirely. Yet little miracles of grace did occur, as when Gelb played the piano in a mock-primitive, Monkian style: a version of “Wayfaring Stranger” somehow became “Fly Me to the Moon”, and odd carnivalesque, plinky-plonky instrumentals intersected the few proper songs.The CDs kept on coming, too. “Sometimes they come so fast, you don’t have time to learn them,” he said, in that trademark Western drawl.It’s the charm of the voice and the lean and hungry, Gary Cooper-as-cosmic-cowboy looks that captivate as much as the music – what there was of it. The grand, imposing hall seemed to shrink to the size of a front parlour or porch as Gelb took requests Except, he couldn’t remember any of his songs.

“No, that’s not it,” he’d say, skipping to another track, as the audience became increasingly nonplussed “Ah, nervous laughter,” he said. We laughed nervously.
Maybe Gelb was deconstructing the tired rituals of the artist-audience relationship Maybe he was stoned. Whatever the case, by the end of the show he had us all in the palm of his hand. “I’m looking for the future of rock,” Gelb announced from the prow of the stage at the start of his set, then he walked over to a CD Walkman on top of the piano and began playing tracks from his works-in-progress.

The Arizonan singer-songwriter and alt.country legend Howe Gelb went to see Lost in Translation instead. He seemed to take some of the actor Bill Murray’s cultivated air of jet-lagged alienation away with him, too Either that or he really was off with the fairies. Some performers prepare for a show by taking a nap or doing a little light meditation. “They’re a sound-world in which the audience has to make a leap of faith, in the people performing it, that they will carry you safely through.”OK, Gwen-Ann, carry me Wigmore Hall, London W1 (020-7935 2141; .uk), Friday, 7.30pm. She was an example of someone who had done it, who had shown that it was possible.” No surprise, either, that Jessye Norman should be another role model, though less for her blackness than for her interpretation of lieder. “There are a great many good lieder-singers in the world, but it’s a breath of fresh air when you find one who doesn’t sound like everybody else.”At once grand and coquettish, Jeffers lays great emphasis on finding one’s own interpretations, and on the evanescence of the art.

“Singing is a fleeting experience and it’s not just a matter of vocal beauty Beautiful voices are 10-a-penny. It’s what comes on top that matters: are you simpatico? Does the audience take to you? There are people who can walk on stage and – without their singing a note – the audience is with them every step of the way.”Messiaen’s songs, Jeffers admits, are a challenge as much for her listeners as they are for her. “At that time,” Jeffers says, “there were so few black opera singers who had become prima assoluta. Your job is to find out what their aesthetics were, what their thought was.”No surprise that her first role model should have been the American soprano Leontyne Price. “I loved the challenge of it – of having to be like a detective, in that almost everything you sing is in a foreign language, and the composers are, for the most part, dead. At Exeter University she majored in composition, “because it meant I learnt how orchestras worked, and could become an all-round musician”.Jeffers is an accomplished pianist, but a singer is what she wanted to be from the start.