In 1938 Barney Josephson (1902-1988), the son of Latvian Jewish immigrants, borrowed $6,000 to open a club in Greenwich Village called Cafe Society. Nicknamed "The Wrong Place for the Right People", the club became a cultural phenomenon, a pioneering bastion of racial integration that played host to jazz legends such as Sarah Vaughan, Count Basie, Lena Horne and Billie Holiday.

Written and directed by pianist and songwriter Alex Webb, and narrated by BBC Radio presenter Max Reinhardt, Jazz at Cafe Society – performed this week at London’s Tricycle Theatre – took you through a ten-year period from the club's idealistic beginning to its eventual demise in the anti-Communist hysteria of the late 1940s. If, as a dramatic spectacle, the show felt a little inert, there were some great individual turns from the trio of singers. China Moses gave an exquisitely enunciated take on 'Parlez-Moi d'Amour' (OK, she's the music correspondent for French TV's Le Grand Journal, but even so). Gwyneth Herbert (pictured) bookended her own arrangement of 'Lord Randall' with the most extraordinary falsetto, accompanying herself for the most part on the dinkiest of ukuleles, while Alexander Stewart swaggered convincingly through 'I Left My Baby'.

Great arrangements, too, from Webb and Frank Griffith (tenor sax, clarinet), who were joined on stage by Nathaniel Facey (alto sax), Sue Richardson (trumpet), Nathaniel Cross (trombone), Jo Caleb (guitar), Gary Crosby (bass) and Rod Youngs (drums). The evening also featured a terrific new song from Webb, 'Red Scare'. Arranged here for vocal trio and band, it deserves many more airings. The show ended with – what else? – a remarkably powerful version of 'Strange Fruit', the anti-lynching ballad that Josephson discovered and asked Holiday to sing. Performed as it would have been at Cafe Society, with a sole spotlight trained on China Moses, it was the one truly theatrical moment of the evening.

– Peter Quinn