Star rating: *** Carol Kidd has always been a bit of an enigma. There are those - and you can count your reviewer among them - who believe that, with her talent, Kidd could have gone to the top of the world's jazz singing tree. If she'd wanted to. Singing to promote her new album, Dreamsville, her first after a lengthy lull following her partner's death, Kidd showed all the old magic - clear diction, telling phrasing, great pitch - and more.

Star rating: ***

Carol Kidd has always been a bit of an enigma. There are those - and you can count your reviewer among them - who believe that, with her talent, Kidd could have gone to the top of the world's jazz singing tree. If she'd wanted to. Singing to promote her new album, Dreamsville, her first after a lengthy lull following her partner's death, Kidd showed all the old magic - clear diction, telling phrasing, great pitch - and more.

Fine though Dreamsville is, Kidd singing to people as opposed to a studio wall produces an extra edge, a deeper human touch and some daring variations and elastic breathing. She was so good to begin with, and so at ease with her quartet, that one slightly skewed syllable stood out like a swearword on Songs of Praise. Her duet with bassist Tom Lyne on Bye Bye Blackbird was equal parts typically gallus fun and high art, and Stars Fell on Alabama was simply sublime.

Things began to go awry, though, on I've Got You Under My Skin. Maybe it was just where I was sitting but the heavy reverb on Kidd's microphone reduced this from swinging'n'singing to shouting. The two new songs by Glasgow writer J J Gilmour that followed may be decent soft-rock but they're not what Kidd does best and the second half varied between the gorgeous - Dreamsville itself and a drop dead Happiness is a Thing Called Joe - and the disappointingly dreary, including a sonically messy reading of Kidd's signature song, When I Dream, and a pub jam version of Joe Cocker's Unchain My Heart.