That's just the way it is

Arto Lindsay | Jazz Cafe, London

Arto Lindsay has a big catalogue of songs under his belt, but you wouldn't call him a singer-songwriter. The lyrics are opaque and poetic, sometimes in Portuguese, enunciated with tender clarity. The tunes are catchy, sexy, short and sweet, but it's not pop or rock. An evening with Lindsay's band will include moments of rhythmic and sonic density - a contemporary barrage of percussion and electric noise - but we're in a different hemisphere from Sonic Youth or the Zawinul Syndicate. Nor is it world music, though it takes inspiration from Brazilian bossa nova. And although it isn't really jazz, this crowded club is an ideal setting, with its friendly vibe and polite notices asking the audience to remain quiet during performances. (A less polite STFU is stencilled on a pillar behind the bandstand.)

Lindsay's band, the drummer Skoota Warner, the bassist Melvin Gibbs, the guitarist Vinicius Cantuária, and Takuya Nakamura (keyboards, samplers and trumpet) have stunning improvisatory, listening and interpretative skills, but they play 16 numbers in the time a jazz group would have played half a dozen. This is music of humour, surprise, virtuosity and invention. There's a thrill in the recognition that it is the sound of right now, but Lindsay is unlikely to write a song with "e-mail" or "cellphone" in the lyric, but the music, in its form, content and expression, says a lot about the way we live, work, love and play.

Lindsay's work is somehow post-technology, post-multitrack, employing sidemen who know how digital music-making can counterfeit and replace reality and play in a manner that both acknowledges and supersedes it. A natural, musicianly interplay is combined with the ability to separate threads within the whole, as if in the frozen time of a studio remix. With superb timing and feel, they create passages in which Lindsay's free-form guitar shoots off into sheets of noise over Gibbs's unstoppable bass, while Cantuária and Warner lock into an intricate groove with Nakamura's beatbox.

Though he uses great collaborators, you feel Lindsay's musical vision transcends individual talents (only the superb Gibbs remains from the band that played here last year). Arto may not know any guitar chords, but as a band-leader, he's the boss. And covers such as Al Green's "Simply Beautiful" show what an effective singer he has become. Some of his songs - "Resemblances", "O Nome Dela", "Simply Are", "Whirlwind" and "Ondina" - already sound like classics.

There's no sense that an original is definitive - a new interpretation is always worth decoding, as it was/is for Ellington, Monk and Gilberto. You can regard Lindsay's last four albums, The Subtle Body, Mundo Civilizado, Noon Chill and Prize, and wonderfully generous gigs such as this, as part of a vast work in progress of great 21st-century music.