I play Bach, but he comes out differently every night.” And he has no false modesty: “Until my group came on the scene, Gypsy music had been stagnating. What we do is completely new.”I finally catch him and his band – second fiddle, piano, cimbalom, bass – at a record-company bash, where the music justifies that promise. The whirling sounds blend with the smoky atmosphere to create a madly exciting miasma, in the middle of which Lakatos radiates authority and a massive repose. They’re all virtuosi, but Lakatos is beyond compare, with irresistible swing, a huge range of colour and rock-steady intonation no matter how high or fast he plays.This is the man who will top the bill at the Royal Albert Hall in London next Tuesday. “An Evening of Klezmer and Gypsy Music” is the BBC’s description of this Prom, whose other stars are David Krakauer’s “Klezmer Madness!” Klezmer is often described as “the Jewish jazz”, and it’s never been in more vigorous health, drawing on the same spring as Gypsy music and achieving similar effects. The term comes from two Hebrew words, “kley” and “zemer”, meaning “vessel of song”; “klezmorim” became the generic term for all Jewish musicians in Eastern Europe.

Their music has always fused elements from specifically Jewish contexts – religious observances in synagogue and home – with local styles.From Greece north via Albania and Romania, the Jewish Gypsy bands who acted as licensed professional musicians developed styles that were virtually interchangeable. Moreover, richer Jews in Hungary would hire Gypsy bands to play for them: much of our information about Transylvanian Jewish music comes from Gypsies who were playing it when the Holocaust wiped out their patrons, and their Jewish fellow-musicians. Meanwhile, the dispersed klezmorim simply carried on in the United States where European pogroms had forced them to leave off. Klezmer is constantly renewed, but always remains itself.Its influence is steadily invading the classical camp.

Three years ago it inspired Itzhak Perlman to make an oddly bewitching CD, Klezmer: In the Fiddler’s House (EMI), on which songs and dances are gracefully interwoven.Lakatos finds klezmer fun, but insists on the superiority of his more ancient Gypsy style. He’s got scores of young imitators in Hungary, and he plans to help them. “I want them to have the chance to learn with the best players, as I did.” He intends to set up a school.Prom 33, 14 Aug, 10pm, RAH, London SW7 (020-7589 8212). Female singer-songwriters: ah yes, we know about them.

In the current climate, it seems there’s one along every three months or so: Billie Myers (what happened to her?), Shea Seger, Nikka Costa and the upcoming Tupperware, or is it Peppercorn?

Female singer-songwriters: ah yes, we know about them. In the current climate, it seems there’s one along every three months or so: Billie Myers (what happened to her?), Shea Seger, Nikka Costa and the upcoming Tupperware, or is it Peppercorn? They burst upon our consciousness and then slowly fade away, but Nerina Pallot (rhymes with “fallow”) is determined that’s not going to happen to her. She dismisses the notion like a rabid dog because she hopes that she’s better than that. She talks about the music and the career speaking for itself, cites Patti Smith and PJ Harvey, though her influences range from Joni to Dylan, Rickie Lee Jones to Steely Dan.
Her debut album, Dear Frustrated Superstar, while not quite up to those stellar standards, is a winsome thing with a full, lush sound – a bit jazzy, a bit folky, and hugely American in its warmth and confidence (but then, it was produced by LA studio kingpin Bob Clearmountain). The lyrics are knowing and assured, a good reflection of Pallot. And truly, her life is currently going so well, it’s difficult not to punch her. She’s just 26, with an exotic family history and the looks to go with it, she has a loving boyfriend and musical partner, and a public school background which gives her an articulate, classy drawl tempered with the usual estuary consonants.Pallot’s mother was born in Allahabad, India and got shipped over to London with her dowager great-aunt Violet.

Pallot’s mum, a singer, met her half-French dad while on tour in Jersey, which is where our heroine grew up It wasn’t a particularly happening place. Though Nerina was musical, learning piano from the age of four, the only gigs to visit were the Black and White Minstrels seaside show and the Nolans. A music scholarship to a Berkshire boarding school, where there were 800 boys and 50 girls, remains a grim memory – “eggs thrown at you, being called a whore every morning” Is this true? Pallot almost bridles. “If I’d kept my head down I’d probably have been fine, but I can’t bear that arrogance you get with kids who have everything handed to them on a plate – all right, I was there, but my parents worked their arses off On top of that, the bullying. They couldn’t stand me to have an opinion.”Did any of these boys turn out to achieve anything? “Oh, they’ll go on to be orthopaedic surgeons and stockbrokers, playing out their God fantasy.” A dismissive wave of the hand. “Girls don’t talk about it because they think ‘the boys will like me more if I just take it’.