Dubliner Christine Tobin is scarcely known in her native country, yet this London-based, gifted singer has won a glowing reputation abroad. She talks to Ray Comiskey before performing at this weekend's Guinness Jazz Festival

To hear Christine Tobin performing nowadays and, just as importantly, to talk to her, the impression grows that this is a considerable talent waiting to be discovered, if not by the general public, at least by a broader section of jazz fans.

She's not, and never will be, Diana Krall - now more an industry phenomenon than anything else - but she is as distinctive, capable and intelligent a singer as, say, Karin Krog, which is praise enough for any jazz vocalist.

This year, for example, she has sung for director Mike Figgis in a six-part series on the blues produced by Martin Scorsese for American television; other directors of the series include Clint Eastwood, Wim Wenders and Scorsese himself.

She also spent time working in Vienna with the Austrian classical group, Ensemble Plus, in a tribute to Billie Holiday presented in a contemporary classical context, with the melody and words of the songs retained, but with everything else rewritten by bassist and composer Peter Herbert. The results have been dubbed "Schoenberg meets Billie Holiday" and a CD of the music, You're My Thrill, is due out next year.

And, if that isn't enough, in August she recorded an album of her own songs. Called You Draw The Line, it's her fifth under her own name. Also due out in the new year, it marks a return to base for her after her standards album, Deep Song, made in New York in 1999 with Herbert, guitarist Phil Robson (also her partner), saxophonist Mark Turner and drummer Billy Hart.

Few singers, Krog apart, could tackle such a range of interpretative demands. Not that Krog ever exerted any discernible influence on her. It was Joni Mitchell, in fact, who opened the door to jazz for her.

"I bought Joni Mitchell's Mingus album - it was the first Joni Mitchell album I'd ever bought and I thought the music was amazing. I instantly thought 'great, what kind of music is this? Some fella called Mingus?' "

It was the late Charles Mingus: innovative bassist, composer, and volcanic soul. She bought his Mingus-Ah-Um album - there must have been some literate, Latin scholars in the record industry then - and discovered jazz.

Soon people were telling her about Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald. Suddenly she found herself with a repertoire that could be made to sound fresh. "It didn't matter that it was 10-years-old or 60-years-old. The songs are good and they're adaptable." She learned about 20 of them and, with a guitarist called Anthony Stapleton, went looking for gigs.

A year-and-a-half later, with very few opportunities to perform in Dublin, she headed for London, armed with a few contacts. "I thought I was, like, passing through on my glamorous way to New York, but that was in 1987, so I got stuck there." She got a postgraduate scholarship to study the jazz course at the Guildhall the following year, by which time she was building a reputation among jazz musicians over there. Then, fatefully, saxophonist Tim Garland called to ask her to guest on a record.

"He knew I was Irish and he asked me would I sing the tune Black Hair on a record. He actually sang it down my answering machine and I learned it from that." An invitation to join his band, Lammas, which mixed Gaelic folk music and jazz, followed.

"Then he discovered I could sing in Irish as well, so I did that. Then, unfortunately, that stuck to me. It was like I was wrapped in the Tricolour, you know." Lammas took 10 years to grind naturally to a halt, and though she hasn't touched that kind of material in years, its connotations were hard to shake off.

Putting out her own CDs helped, particularly her 1998 House Of Women album, which, arising from her increasing interest in writing original material, had a lot of her own songs on it. But it helped only up to a point.

"Then I see this big u-turn in the music," she explains, "when everybody's going back to standards, people like (saxophonist) Joshua Redman and (trumpeter) Wynton Marsalis. And then Diana Krall, of course, came along.

"So I thought I'll do a record of standards" - Deep Song - "because there seemed to be a problem of this folk thing being stuck to me. And the music I was writing, as well, some people were finding it difficult to categorise, people who tend to put things into boxes. It's just a problem being a singer if you start dipping into different things; instrumentalists don't have that problem," she adds.

Standards do offer the comfort of the familiar to audiences, but when she does them as an extra flavour to add to her own material, she usually puts her own stamp on them. Sometimes there's an "in" flavour to it, like her arrangement of Witchcraft, which incorporates chords in the manner of Miles Davis's ESP. "It's kind of me just having a bit of fun, if people notice it. Musicians do," she adds with a mischievous smile.

"But I'm going back to doing more original material. I really want to do that. I mean, I've been developing the sound and all that for a long time, and I think it's got stronger because I was trying to do things you hear more in instrumental music, blend that with the songs. I think I've got quite good at it now. I'm singing a bit differently, so naturally the more you work at it, you refine it the better.

"I must say I really like a lot of harmony, and I like a mixture of romance and dissonance. I like Messiaen's music because of that, and the Viennese guy who died real young, Alban Berg, and Webern as well. And, I suppose, I kind of like dark songs and romance. There's a kind of edginess and I'm drawn to that sound and I like singing it."

What the fans will hear in Cork will be mostly her own songs, especially the new material recorded in August for her forthcoming album. "It was really good fun doing it and it sounds more live than anything I've done before. It's quite funky."

Dublin won't have to wait long to hear her either, as she's due back with her band on November 30th, when she plays Project; after that it will be the turn of Sligo and Limerick to judge for themselves.

Christine Tobin and her band are at the Triskel, in Cork, tomorrow, at 2.30pm, as part of this weekend's Guinness Jazz Festival