JAMIE Cullum, the British jazz find of the year, will make his York Barbican Centre debut on February 27 next year in the only Yorkshire show of his six-date tour.

Tickets are on sale at £17.50 and early booking is advised on 01904 656688.

In April, the 23-year-old singer and pianist from Wiltshire signed a £1 million record deal with Universal/Verve. Time to move on from playing at the Soho Pizza Express of a London lunchtime and from the days of paying himself only £1,600 for his first two albums.

While at Reading University studying Film and English Literature, Cullum had begun composing and playing his own music to accompany the short films he made as part of his course. One afternoon, he recorded an album, Heard It All Before, and duly sold 700 copies at a tenner each at gigs.

He ploughed that money, and what was left of his student loan, into making another album, Pointless Nostalgic. Among the tracks were Cullum's taunting of Pop Idol, I Wanna Be A Pop Star, and his jazz piano cover of Radiohead's High And Dry.

Pointless Nostalgic came out on small jazz label, Candid, and Universal started to take note. So did chat-show host Michael Parkinson, and then Prince Charles, who invited him to play at The Queen's birthday party at St James's Palace in May.

This October Cullum took up a three-week residency at the famed Algonquin Rooms in New York, the first European to headline. His first album for Universal, Twentysomething, arrived this autumn with its musical range spanning Fifties musical numbers and Nineties alternative rock via self-penned soulful jazz.

"I'm still learning, I'm still discovering," he says. "There's still a couple of Beatles albums I havent heard, and there are still lots of corners of jazz I haven't explored."

Updated: 10:23 Friday, November 28, 2003