YOU don't turn to Jackie Leven for light relief.

The idiosyncratic singer and composer is usually to be found in music's deeper pools, perhaps under the shade of the gloomier sort of tree. This new CD, while hardly earning a tick in the box marked "cheerful", shows Leven in lighter mood, mixing jazz, folk, waltzing, a bit of hip-hop, all sorts really, into a soulful and individual brew. Levity is still not the word for it, especially with long songs and bursts of spoken poetry, which include the singer Canadian Ron Sexsmith reading a poem by ee cummings. Yet amid the shade, and the occasional pretentious moments, there is a lightness of spirit, a warming of the old weariness, as shown on the opening Classic Northern Diversions, in which Leven observes: "It took me 50 long years just to work out/That because I was angry didn't mean I was right." Occasionally difficult, sometimes lovely.

Updated: 08:51 Thursday, February 27, 2003