Christine Tobin
You Draw The Line
BDV 2327

Album named as one of "1000 Albums to Hear Before You Die" in The Guardian in November 2007

Tower of Song (Cohen) mp3
Stone Cold (Tobin)
Go Tell (Tobin)
Night Talking (Tobin/Robson) mp3
You Draw the Line (Tobin)
Concepta (Tobin/Robson)
All I Really Want To Do (Dylan)
The Intellectual Engineer (Tobin)
Hell Hath no Fury (Tobin)

Christine Tobin, voice; Phil Robson, guitar; Liam Noble, piano; Jeremy brown, bass; Chris Higginbottom/ Steve Arguelles (drums)

On singer-songwriter Tobin's new album You Draw the Line , her fifth album for the label, she directs her highly personal vocal to a set of dynamic mainly self-penned songs and revitalised covers of Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan from her unique jazz-hued singer/songwriter perspective. By creating new material within a broad structure of what contemporary vocal jazz means today, Tobin emerges as an earthy, expressive singer and composer taking her place alongside other jazz crossover artists such as Joni Mitchell and Cassandra Wilson. She has replaced the first Great American songbook on her previous album in 2000 Deep Song with two new standards not normally associated with traditional jazz singing. The Golden Age evergreens are gone, replaced by Cohen's Tower of Song, which acts as a manifesto of her artistic vision (from his 1988 comeback album I'm Your Man), and Dylan's All I Really Want To Do. Her band consists of a strong British contingent of sensitive, much-lauded regular guitarist Phil Robson, bassist Jeremy Brown, drummers Chris Higginbottom and Steve Argüelles, and the vital addition of bright, refreshingly inventive pianist Liam Noble. As part of a steadily increasing profile, Tobin has recorded a Bessie Smith song for a documentary film about the development of the blues in Britain directed by leading British director Mike Figgis, part of a set of films produced by Martin Scorsese to be released soon. The CD cover design is by Gee Vaucher, of the (in)famous Crass Collective.

The Guardian, 25 April 2003

No time to scat Christine Tobin is inspiring on her own material. But she is in a class of her own singing Leonard Cohen (John L Walters)

Dublin-born singer and songwriter Christine Tobin is slowly building up an impressive catalogue of songs. You Draw The Line gathers seven originals and two covers (Dylan, Cohen) in a thoughtful, well focused production. The airy openness of the recording - using guitar (Tobin's partner Phil Robson), piano, drums and double bass - enhances the warmth and edge of Tobin's voice. A change of drummers helps to enhance and differentiate the grooves that underpin her best numbers: four tracks feature the highly original Steve Arguelles, and the remainder are driven along by Chris Higginbottom. Other singers will study Tobin's songs for inspiration or new material: you can imagine a roots-type performer having fun with Go Tell and a jazz group stretching out on the McCoy Tyner-inspired Stone Cold. And the poetry Tobin reads - including work by Paul Muldoon, Eva Salzman and Don Paterson - appears to inform her intelligent approach to lyric-writing and interpretation. Though "jazz singer" is the label most commonly applied to Tobin, this is not a record of extended scatting or breathy cliche. Tobin's songwriting skills put her more in the class of Carmen Lundy (working this week and next at Ronnie Scott's London) and Patricia Barber (appearing soon at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival). But the best songs on the new album put her in a class of her own. On Hell Hath No Fury, Tobin draws a direct line between the anger of the lyrics and the beautifully judged agitation of the backing band. The production foregrounds Tobin's voice, so that you can hear all the words, the hot/cool enunciation of the acerbic lyrics. ("Changing around the furniture/ Is no substitute for life/ I tried but failed/ To stay a beautiful wife.") Tobin explains that the song is about a character from the Pedro Almodovar movie Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown. Concepta, another "character" song (co-written with Robson), is a true-life tale about an Italian matriarch with whom Tobin lodged as a 20-year-old traveller. Asked to name favourite songwriters, Tobin cites Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell (through whom she first discovered jazz) and Bjork. She adores jazz, liking its "timeless quality", and draws on its language, but hopes to reach an audience beyond the jazz cognoscenti, to an audience of "people who might be dipping into different things". The reharmonisation that snakes round All I Really Want To Do might frighten or tighten a few Dylan disciples, but it's a blessing for those of us who admire the man's songs while finding his whine the most difficult of difficult listening. But Tobin is perhaps at her best singing Cohen: the reinvention of Tower of Song, a bluesy number from the late 1980s "comeback" album I'm Your Man, reveals Tobin at her best. "I really like the words but I don't like Cohen's arrangement, which features a horrible Casio-type [keyboard] sound," she says. Tobin wisely moves Cohen's wry visions back to the 1960s - not hippie introspection, but a homage to the Miles Davis band that featured Tony Williams on drums. She did something similar with Cohen's Song of Isaac on her 1998 album House of Women (Babel). But this is better. Tobin sings the opening lines ("My friends are gone and my hair is grey/I ache in places where I used to play") over Jeremy Brown's solo bass riff. Higginbottom's spacious cymbal pulse doesn't even begin until the second verse. After the arrangement reaches the final line ("I'll be speaking to you sweetly from my window in the tower of song") the band quotes the famous descending sequence from In a Silent Way/ It's About That Time, a bodacious abseil from Cohen's high-rise to the mighty palace of jazz.

TOBIN’S SONGWRITING SKILLS PUT HER MORE IN THE CLASS OF CARMEN LUNDY AND PATRICIA BARBER. BUT THE BEST SONGS ON THE ALBUM PUT HER IN A CLASS OF HER OWN (THE GUARDIAN)

BBC JAZZ ON 3 CD OF THE YEAR 2003

JAZZWISE FEBRUARY 2004 JAMIE CULLUM’S CHART: NO.1 CHRISTINE TOBIN - YOU DRAW THE LINE

ABOVE ALL THE VOICE IS A KILLER (FROOTS)

A FASCINATING PERFORMER, SOMEWHAT REMOTE FROM THE JAZZ MAINSTREAM, BUT ENTIRELY IN THE SPIRIT OF THE MUSIC (PENGUIN GUIDE TO JAZZ)

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