This was always promised to be a very different gig to the norm. The iconic Ronnie Scott's venue, celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, commissioned Gilles Peterson to put together a series of gigs featuring artists that, while not inherently jazz, nonetheless felt right playing there. That said, the Ronnie Scott's website featured numerous 'warnings' that the performances would be of a hip hop nature and that this was not - repeat NOT - a jazz gig.

First up was Speech Debelle, fresh from her Mercury Prize win. I'm happy to admit - though maybe I shouldn't as one of Flashlight's resident heads - that I had never heard her before. I had heard from a few people who had seen her performance at the Mercury event that she was distinctly overrated. They were wrong. Her band, consisting of an extremely smiley double bassist, a guitarist that Speech insisted the crowd call Lenny Kravitz, and a drummer named Toby that Speech insisted on calling Tyrone, were as tight as such a situation demanded, the intricate yet laid back grooves a perfect background for her everyday musings. Being an all seated venue housing no more than a few hundred people, the atmosphere was quiet, meaning that when a particularly funny lyric was dropped - and there were many, for she is a dextrous, witty lyricist - you could actually hear the crowd laughing over the music. A bizarre, but thoroughly entertaining experience.

I said in this week's Tracks that you'd be hard pushed to find a more charismatic live act. This would normally be true, but tonight she wasn't even the most charismatic act on the bill. Roots Manuva shuffled onstage, resplendent in shades and gold suit, looking every inch the bona fide star. His set then proceeded to show that he really, really, should be such a star. Backed by Afrobeat drumming god Tony Allen, as well as backing vocalists, extremely jazz looking keyboardist and a female drummer who didn't look a day over eleven years old (though was probably about twenty; they grow up so fast nowadays), he played a set of unique renditions of tracks from each of his four albums. For the first few songs, it appeared as though Roots was a little overawed by the intimacy of the occasion, barely moving and appearing to have his eyes closed behind the shades. Hearing a chilled, live version of the raucous pop of 'Buff Nuff' was altogether odd. But by the time he played 'Dreamy Days' and 'Again and Again', he had the crowd eating out of his hands, a load of jazz mums and dadsconverted to the ways of UK hip hop, and a gaggle of people already familiar with his genius wondering how an act so able to cross boundaries and adapt his sound to the most unfamiliar of settings can fail to be a household name. Ronnie would have been proud.