Anyone strolling along Brighton seafront on Sunday night might have heard strains of music coming from Concorde 2 and wondered what century they were in.

The sound of vaudevillian trumpets, calypso guitars and the raspy, sleepy, sleazy voice of CW Stoneking leading the Primitive Horn Orchestra in a dixieland carnival of voodoo blues and ragtime jazz might have come straight out of a New Orleans speakeasy in 1929.

Anyone stepping inside would have been in for even more of a shock.

Instead of seeing a middle-aged Louisiana bluesman swigging moonshine and hammering away at the worn ivories of a honky-tonk piano, the curious listener would have seen CW himself – a pasty, nervous-looking 30-something Australian who lives in Bristol.

Impeccably dressed in a red bow tie and high-buttoned white suit, the dapper bandleader looked like a cross between an ice-cream seller and a ventriloquist’s dummy.

Playing tunes from his two award-winning albums (King Hokum and Jungle Blues), the Aussie jazzman got the rapt crowd swinging with his retro brand of shuffling delta rhythms, self-consciously styled after the storytelling roots music of Jelly Roll Morton and Ma Rainey.

Laden with off-beat and off-key humour, and playing impetuously with the structural tenets of the 12-bar blues, CW’s brassy beats were bent with a modern, knowing twist that drew comparisons with Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart alongside his Mississippi heroes.

The sound and the picture might not have matched, but music like this only comes along every 80 years or so.