Since the closure in December of Cafe Prague, the wonderfully entertaining cabaret night which she hosted monthly at Komedia, Barb Jungr has not been shirking.

She has been working on a new set for sell-out cabaret trio Girl Talk, she has been bringing her self-penned musical to the stage - and she has been entertaining African-American folk legend Odetta.

"I was in New York a few weeks ago and she came to see my show," she gushes. "She doesn't walk well now and she's got terrible asthma, but she came up at the end and said, 'I love you, y'know that'. I just cried. I mean, bloody hell, she's a living legend.

"What's amazing is that she remembers stuff you read about in books. She remembers being thrown off a train because white people got on it and she was on the podium with Martin Luther King. So her coming to my gig is not a small thing for me at all."

Having cut her teeth on the Seventies cabaret circuit, performing with the likes of Julian Clary and Alexei Sayle, via vocal harmony group The Three Courgettes, Jungr seems, in her time, to have met and collaborated with pretty much everyone.

But her new-found friendship with the 76-year-old Odetta is particularly close to her heart at the moment because she is currently living and breathing the music of gospel and blues.

"On my last few albums I've always had a theme," says Jungr, whose 2005 show Love Me Tender was an astounding journey into the repertoire of Elvis Presley. "So this time I thought I'd actually quite like to be less strict with myself and just sing the songs which move my heart in the deepest place, which is gospel and blues."

Both a "passionate fan and a student" of this music, Jungr even contributed the section on voice to the Cambridge Companion To Blues And Gospel. But her incomparable talent is as a song stylist, rearranging, reinterpreting and bringing new life to others' songs.

Moving away from the lone piano accompaniment, Jungr will tonight appear in a brand new format, accompanied by two female musicians on everything from harmonica to Fender bass. Taking the remit of blues and gospel widely, her new set will include Jimmy Cliff's Many Rivers To Cross, Curtis Mayfield's People Get Ready, Marvin Gaye's Can I Get A Witness and Carole King's Way Over Yonder.

"You sing with feeling if you've lived," she comments. "That's why we listen to people sometimes and go, 'That doesn't really ring true'. I quite like what Joss Stone does with her voice but she is too young and we know that.

"You can take her singing about being in love with boys because she's a little blondey thing but she should stick to that. You can't really sing about loss and pain, and the transcendence of music can't reach you, if you haven't understood that we are utterly frail and f*****."

Starts at 8.30pm. Tickests cost £12 and £10, call 01273 647100