Billy Jenkins has a love/hate relationship with jazz. He is a strange and gifted blues aficionado yet also a deeply irreverent critic of the form, a hotshot guitarist quite capable of lampooning the music's pretensions.

He and his Collective demanded pious quiet from the Dean Clough audience for their entrance, chanting "All hail to the blues", with sprinkled water blessings lending a quasi-religious quality to their tomfoolery.

Then his extraordinary fretwork was peppered with throwaway jibes.

"You have jazz here once a month," he told us. "You're lucky; it's every night in London."

A self-taught guitar buff, he began as a burlesque act in the 1970s, styling himself as a jazz/art rock player.

Along the way he built up a European following and still possesses the licks to impress the connoisseur.

His current line-up have been touring with him since the 1990s. Dylan Bates electric violin, bassist Thad Kelly and drummer Mike Pickering seemed in total awe of the maestro while they fooled around together as he was busy chastising the audience.

Jenkins's playing is sophisticated jazz virtuosity with sounds based on nimble picking, which might come from much younger blues-metal fans.

He sends out mixed signals, at once uncouth and amiable, winning and vague.

Neither completely serious nor entirely funny, Jenkins has enough skill and experience to offer an instructive lesson in 20th-century electric guitar styles.

A true one-off, he uniquely marries instrumental virtuosity with a wry dose of stand-up lunacy.