OTTAWA — Scratch a veteran smooth jazzer and underneath you might find a jazzer.

So it seemed from Monday night’s TD Ottawa Jazz Festival concert by Bob James and David Sanborn. The two jazz stars, co-leading an acoustic group with drum legend Steve Gadd and rock-solid, scene-stealingly good acoustic bassist Scott Colley, played with not only crowd-pleasing accessibility but great intensity and sincere commitment, too.

While they might be renowned for a string of polished, funky studio efforts that opened the door for the vapidity of Kenny G and the smooth jazz ilk, James and Sanborn, while true to their signature sounds, were not making background music. The concert was certainly polished and smooth, groovy and bluesy, but smooth jazz in the elevator-music sense it wasn’t.

Sanborn impressed with his impossibly ripe sound and the passionate, bluesy phrases that he defined decades ago but nonetheless played with real heart. Sanborn was also something of a jazz quote machine, dropping in snippets from Invitation, Honeysuckle Rose, In An English Country Garden, I’ve Found A New Baby and more.

James was elegant and consonant, but there was go-for-it energy to his solos, too, as well as some ear-catching complexity and interesting material to some of his solo introductions.

The show’s opener, Montezuma, was surprisingly hard-hitting, with big solos in particular from Colley and Gadd, who both demonstrated that they had come to play exuberantly and personally within the context of the music.

James’s You Better Not Go To College, which opens the new James/Sanborn CD Quartette Humaine, was a gentle, two-feel swinger that grew more spirited before its conclusion. The pianist’s piece Deep In The Weeds was a rollicking funk exercise with another standout solo by Colley.

The Marcus Miller-penned tunes More Than Friends and Maputo, which James and Sanborn had recorded in the mid-1980s on their disc Double Vision, were poppier and sassier, more in-the-box. But that proto-smooth-jazz box was one that James, Sanborn and Gadd had built, and the pieces sounded both full of intention and freshened in their 2013 remake.

The group also applied itself to the jazz standard My Old Flame. The arrangement was meaty and slick, and the tune swaggered, if in an occasionally heavy-handed fashion. Sanborn took the tune out with a flag-waving, soulful expression that quoted Rhapsody In Blue not once but twice.

Opening for Sanborn and James was Montreal teenaged singing sensation Nikki Yanofky.

Yanofsky, just 19, saved her best for last, with her set’s encore, belting out a powerful rendition of the Etta James hit I’d Rather Go Blind. Yanofsky has a remarkable set of pipes and a striking ability to emulate iconic singers such as James and Ella Fitzgerald.

But the rest of her set was too often frothy and glitzy, marred by efforts to merge pop and jazz that felt stilted and forced. A funky version of Jeepers Creepers, complete with a sample of Louis Armstrong singing, and a backbeat-driven version of Witchcraft were simply leaden. A version of You Won’t Be Satisfied was funky and perky, squarely at odds with its lyrics.

For every tune that worked — a hip-hopping Killing Me Softly and Yanofsky’s 2010 Olympics hit I Believe — there was at least one tune that flopped — the boring originals You Mean The World To Me and I Don’t Like You Much, for example.

Yanofsky is being mentored by Quincy Jones. Let’s hope he can steer her incredible talent through its natural growing pains and channel it in the right direction.