Charlie Hunter at the London Jazz Festival, Ronnie Scott’s, London W1

Some of us have had a soft spot for Charlie Hunter ever since the young American guitarist and his band plunged into the Bob Marley songbook more than a decade ago. It was a clever idea, the musicians putting their own imprint on that Seventies classic Natty Dread with a spirited, track-by-track re-creation.

Not surprisingly, Hunter’s unusual eight-string guitar technique has prompted no end of comment since then. Even at full tilt he is somehow able to combine remorseless lead and bass figures. People seeing him for the first time are invariably convinced that he has a Hammond organ player hidden somewhere behind the curtains.

British audiences have not had too many opportunities to see him in action, so it was reassuring to see him playing to a packed room at Ronnie Scott’s. He has shifted to a seven-string approach of late, but the end results are no less impressive. It might seem a recipe for the kind of empty virtuosity that gives jazz a bad name, but his appetite for tasty, blues-inflected hooks keeps any hint of gee-whizzery at bay.

Unorthodox as ever, he was working with a soul-jazz line-up, accompanied by just the drummer Eric Kalb and a three-man British horn section consisting of Graeme Blevins’s unusually mobile baritone sax, Graeme Flowers’s trumpet and the trombone of Barnaby Dickinson.

Having just flown in from Serbia, Hunter freely admitted to being severely sleep-deprived. Yet he was in genial form, supplying the horn players with a constant stream of spoken cues as they negotiated unfailingly melodic riffs, much like some jazz version of the James Brown road show.

The organ timbre had largely disappeared from Hunter’s palette, giving way to spare but pleasingly full-blooded bass lines. With Kalb creating some admirably controlled rhythms, the musicians gave the impression that they were enjoying every minute; much like the audience, in fact. The guitar grandmaster, John Scofield, had set the bar high with his show at the beginning of the festival. Hunter went one better.