Relax, imagine sinking into a sofa made of marshmallow after a foot-slogging day, and you're getting close to the laconic spell cast by American singer-guitarist Leon Redbone. Near the end of a hectic week of Edinburgh Jazz Festival concerts, and ahead of the approaching frenzy of the Fringe juggernaut, this set was a pause for breath.
Redbone is out of time and out of place, strolling on stage to the Third Man theme music like Groucho Marx's chilled-out brother. With his white hat, waistcoat and cane, he cuts a dapper, old-fashioned figure, and the thick moustache and dark glasses enhance the Marx resemblance.
Redbone emerged in America in the early 70s, but is best-known in this country for the soft-shoe strum of the Kick Off Your Shoes song for the British Rail ad campaign. He sings this number with a voice like soft gravel - the easy delivery disguising the complexity of his exceptional ragtime picking on a battered acoustic guitar. Then he leans into the microphone: "I hear the company went out of business after that."
His bone-dry humour and ironic asides reveal a sharp, vaudevillian timing. He hasn't released an album since 1994 and picks most of his material from pre-war American songs - mainly blues but also long-forgotten tangos. Yet he packed the Queen's Hall with an audience that was instantly enveloped in his banter and tunes that were previously confined to dusty 78s and minstrel-show sheet music. All the while he produces curiosities from his jacket pockets, like a conjurer: a camera to take pictures of the audience, sheets of music that are carefully unfolded then discarded, and a bell-horn reminiscent of - this time - Harpo. Then he plays a ringing, hard-picking Robert Johnson blues that I doubt will be equalled in its intensity and sensitivity at any point of this festival. And that is his secret: beneath all the melancholic irony and deadpan banter is a masterly command of ragtime and swing and a genuine love of the American songs of the Depression era - all delivered in a unique, slurred, strangulated voice.
It's no surprise that Gary Larson made him a feature of the Far Side cartoons. To keep an audience enraptured by blowing bubbles to the zither version of A Night in Vienna (he's obviously got a thing about the Third Man) before sliding into a fabulous tempo-shifting version of Travellin' Man is some kind of multifunctional performance art in itself. To be honest, who needs the Fringe when Redbone's around?
