NEW York’s one-man band, banjoist Curtis Eller, isn’t your normal musician – while playing his beloved banjo he stands rather than sits on the stools. That is when he isn’t wandering off stage or performing the splits while never missing a beat.

Unique and innovative, his songs regularly speak of historic events in US history.

He and the audience were never closer than when they shared the vocals on one of his biggest songs, Buster Keaton, with whom Eller shares a likeness.

Mixing vaudeville and the daring of a wirewalker at an Americana Circus, the multitalented Eller lit up the venue like a halogen light with his riveting story-ballads. Fuelled by eccentric contortions of his slim frame, he held the attention of the audience with such standouts as Taking up Serpent’s Again, Hartford Circus Fire, 1944 and After the Soil Fails.

He also performed some fine old-style banjo on the requested Sugar In My Coffin, which fitted nicely alongside a mining song that, as he said, “came with the banjo” and others too many to mention.

But by the close of his show – the second time I’ve seen him – I felt I’d seen enough and was ready for some serious playing, like that of local veterans Hokum Hotshots, who’d opened the evening in their Hawaiian shirts and music to match.

Maurice Hope