At the National Concert Hall in Dublin singer Christine Tobin plays suitable tribute to the great singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen on Tuesday. Long a featured part in the live repertoire of jazz singer Tobin, who has documented her affinity with Cohen in its most comprehensive form to date with her latest album released back in the spring. There are eleven songs in all of Cohen’s on A Thousand Kisses Deep, mostly very familiar, some going back as far as the miracle years of the 1960s but also taking in Cohen’s more recent work. Tobin has arranged some of the selections on the Trail Belle release, and the Margate-based Dubliner is accompanied on the album by her partner Phil Robson on guitar who is also responsible for several of the arrangements, and as well there’s Huw Warren on accordion, Dave Whitford, double bass, and Adriano Adewale percussion, with both pianist Gwilym Simcock and trumpeter Nick Smart guesting. Simcock also steps in to arrange ‘Anthem’, the track he guests on.

The album begins with ‘Famous Blue Raincoat,’ Warren’s brief accordion solo not far in pulls the song in a different direction with Adewale adding some percussive edge. Robson’s sunny accompaniment on ‘Hey That’s No Way To Say Goodbye’ is beautifully captured and Tobin draws out the tenderness in the gently legato treatment of the song in her vocal, one of the best of the love songs covered here. On ‘Tower of Song’ there is a tip of the hat to Miles Davis and Joe Zawinul and of course Cohen himself, one of the more imaginative treatments here. Simcock provides a delicate opening to ‘Anthem’ at which the mood of the album definitely darkens, an inevitability for anyone singing Cohen, and Tobin’s vocal here has a lustre and poise that is very involving. “Ring the bells that still can ring/ Forget your perfect offering/ There is a crack in everything/ That’s how the light gets in.” The selfsame light, a little more celebratory on this occasion, gets in to the John Field Room in An Ceoláras Náisiúnta on 23 September.

Stephen Graham