50 years of Ronnie Scott's

To Ronnie Scott's last night for the first time in this the jazz club's 50th anniversary year. There are those who miss the smoke and bad food that characterised the club before its makeover. I am not among them. The club now serves better food, and it is a bit pricier, but it continues to surprise and delight with its music. I had not, to my shame, previously heard the Brazilian singer Joyce Moreno, who was singing last night her mix of brilliant Bossa Nova standards and some of her own compositions. But I will certainly listen to her again. There was also a splendid support act in Jiving Miss Daisy, with Anjali Perin singing some great 40s and 50s songs. And that's the thing about the club: you always get something good, and often different. Fifty years on, Ronnie Scott's is still bringing us great music.

Clare Teal at Bath Komedia

To see the increasingly impressive Clare Teal in concert at Bath's newest venue, Komedia, last night. Teal has greatly improved her stage show since we last saw her at St George's in Bristol a few years ago, and she benefitted from focusing more on great renditions of forties standards, including the title track of her latest album, the old Judy Garland number Get Happy. With cracking interpretations of songs like Moondance, Love Hurts and Begin the Beguine, Teal has become a hugely confident performer, with an amusing self-deprecating patter, aided by a great band and backing vocalists. On her home patch,

her show works well in the new Komedia, in the old art deco Beau Nash cinema, which has good reasonably priced food to accompany shows like this, though the venue has had its teething problems with its computer booking system and some very bizarre lighting last night. But none of that detracted from a great performance from a hugely entertaining singer in a venue that deserves to succeed. Teal is well worth seeing live.

Claire Martin

To see the velvet-voiced jazz singer Claire Martin at Bath's Ustinov theatre last night. The theatre may lack the ambience of a Ronnie Scott's, but Martin, backed by Jim Mullin on guitar and Laurence Cottle on bass, enthused her audience with a virtuouso performance lasting just over 90 minutes. There were a lot of Shirley Horn numbers - too many perhaps for a mixed audience that would have liked more Julie London or Johnny Mandel, craving a little more familiarity and even a few standards. Moreover, having recently seen a distinctly under par Mark Murphy at Ronnie Scott's, I'm not sure I'd agree with her that he is the finest living jazz singer. But Martin is a fine live singer, and her great voice did as much justice to his music as to that of her heroine Shirley Horn. She is definitely worth catching live if you can.

The death of jazz on digital radio

We've been allowed another jazz digital station for just over a year. The Jazz provides the best music on the radio for those of us who don't want to listen to the hundreds of repetitive pop and rock channels. 364,000 listeners, listening for an average of over five hours a week, seemed to agree. Now somebody called Fru Hazlitt has decided that our tastes have no place in her new 'multi platform environment'. The destruction of digital jazz stations is not a new phenomenon. Previously, the Guardian Media Group had exiled Jazz FM by using its DAB slot to broadcast Smooth FM (though the former survives on the Internet). Apparently we're all going to junk our DAB radios for internet radios, according to Ms Hazlitt. I don't believe it for a moment: millions of listeners have paid a lot for these radios, and they are not going to get rid of them when they can still receive BBC stations; cable and satellite TV listeners are also an important part of the digital audience. But I wonder how much credibility the chief executive of GCap, the company that owns the station, has when she tells us that we must accept the closure of The Jazz so that she can develop "brands and content that can win within a multi-platform environment" creating a "national broadband footprint" and "a new flexible inventory policy with up to nine minutes of advertising per hour"? Surely the whole point of digital radio and TV is to provide audiences with programming that meets their distinctive interests, not to force everybody to listen to nine minutes of ads an hour on Capital Radio even in the name of a "flexible inventory policy"?

Melly's last days

Katie Buchanan's elegant, witty and moving tribute to George Melly, following him and his long-suffering wife Diana through the great entertainer's last days, was a model of good television. Broadcast on BBC 4 - and therefore around again soon - it was particularly moving to see him taken by ambulance to have a last moment with his fans at London's 100 Club where he began his singing career. I first saw Melly, who died in July, on stage at a post-midnight gig in the 1982 Cork Jazz Festival, and saw him perhaps a dozen times since, including at the 100 Club and at his celebrated New Year gigs at Ronnie Scott's. It was sobering to see the great man laid so low as he battled a form of dementia and lung cancer, refusing treatment and trying to live it up in his last months, but there was a life-affirming spirit at work too as he sought to keep singing the blues - albeit with increasing difficulty - to the end. Don't miss this programme when it is repeated.