She may not be planning to do the Carioca or the Continental, but Stacey Kent is following in the footsteps of Fred Astaire in one respect. The

31-year-old, New York-born singer is currently touring with a programme based around Let Yourself Go, her new album of songs linked by their association with the great song and dance man.

For Kent, Astaire has always been more than a movie star. She explains: ''I used to watch his movies over and over again and it was through them that I learned a lot of the repertoire. He wasn't known as a singer because his voice wasn't as masterful as some of his peers, and yet his ability to tell a story was magnificent. It was his delivery that grabbed me as a kid - it was so intimate, so personal, and so infectious. It was through him that I learned songs by Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, and Schwartz and Dietz.''

What Kent particularly loves about Astaire is the fact that he is so ''full of joy''. Indeed, it's a characteristic of her own style. Her breezy, take-it-in-her-stride manner is endearingly unpretentious, and this, combined with her respect for the melody, makes her music unusually accessible by jazz standards. So much so that her appeal extends beyond the jazz world. In fact, after years of being based in London, and concentrating on building up an audience in Britain, Kent has made an unexpected breakthrough in her own country - thanks to exposure on a mainstream TV show.

The show in question, CBS Sunday Morning, was fascinated by Kent's story of how she had left New York as a comparative literature graduate - to visit friends in Oxford - and had come back as an established jazz singer after a

spur-of-the-moment decision to sign up for a postgraduate course in jazz in England. Kent and her regular band - which includes her husband Jim Tomlinson on tenor sax - were filmed working in Britain, and such key figures in her career as Humphrey Lyttelton were interviewed for the feature which was broadcast across the States in February 1998.

The impact of that programme was beyond Kent's wildest expectations. She says: ''There were 10,000 orders for our CD in the first weekend alone and the record company wasn't prepared for that at all. They had to go into emergency second pressing, and then emergency third pressing to cope with the demand.''

As if that wasn't enough of a surprise, the CD in question - The Tender Trap - went straight into the Billboard charts and Kent found herself sharing chart-space with all the big, established names. She is convinced that the overwhelming response to her music was down to the nature of the programme which showcased her. Because it was a programme with a broad remit, rather than a specialist programme, people who would not ordinarily be interested in jazz were able to discover that hers is tuneful, swinging, accessible music - possibly the antithesis of what they might have expected.

Kent believes that jazz music suffers from its label which is really an umbrella for a number of separate genres. She says: ''For some reason along the way, jazz got pigeon-holed and we all get dumped in there together. Saying I like jazz or I don't like jazz is like saying I like art or I don't like art. It's way too broad - are you talking about trad, avant-garde, modern or mainstream? Nobody's expected to like all jazz, even the jazz lovers and players themselves. It's a shame that it gets marketed the way it does, because different jazz is going to appeal to different people.''

And Kent's jazz is going to appeal to anyone who likes songs with intelligent lyrics and memorable tunes, performed by a swinging band led by a singer who knows just how far you should play about with works of genius. So pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and get yourself down to Edinburgh's Queen's Hall to hear this lady letting herself go.

l Stacey Kent plays the Queen's Hall, Edinburgh, at 8.30pm tomorrow. For tickets call

0131-668 2019.

l Let Yourself Go, Candid records, #12.50.