Brushes on snare drum in three-quarter time set the pace—a slow, spacious dance. Enter bass and guitar, weaving a cyclical pattern. Spare notes on a piano are struck, sustained, released, repeated. A tenor sax whispers, soft, luscious and cool. A vibraphone adds punctuation. Everything flows together now, moving the music forward in a perfect symbiosis of folk and jazz sensibility, rising, shifting. Then, more than two minutes into the song, surprising, yet somehow expected, a clear, high, voice descends on strings into this musical tapestry. Three concentrated, poetic verses on the themes of time, light, beauty, love and loss arrive and then pass. Back to the flow of the instruments and the eventual end.

“I Love the Sun” by British songwriter and guitarist Jon Redfern (www.jonredfern.com) is luminous. This former member of the now defunct folk band Tarras clearly finds inspiration in the music of Nick Drake and Miles Davis (cool jazz era), but when trying to describe this song I find myself wanting to make comparisons to Zen. I guess it’s the feeling of getting lost in the immediacy of the music and the way in which Redfern expresses a profound simplicity with an almost prayer-like quality. Redfern maintains this ability to express complexity within simplicity in songs such as “Lost” and “Somewhere,” all on his first solo releas, entitled, “May Be Some Where.”

Toronto-based Melissa McClelland’s second album “Thumbelina’s One Night Stand” is a quirky ride. This collection of songs, aptly described elsewhere as fables, moves chameleon-like from the dreamy, loungy sweetness of “Iroquois St. Factory,” through the ballsy blues of “Passenger 24,” to the heartbreaking country-tinged beauty of “Skyway Bridge” in which Thumbelina longs to “make a boat out of this cigarette pack” and float away. Though the moods, styles and even the sound of McClelland’s voice change regularly throughout this work, every shift is believable and each song maintains its own integrity while remaining connected to the larger dream-like vision.

Comparisons to other artists have been made, including Jolie Holland and fellow Canadians Kathleen Edwards and Sarah Harmer. Yet McClelland’s ability to shape-shift her way through the rich, psychological landscape of her songs is truly a unique talent. Finder her at www.melissamcclelland.com and www.myspace.com/melissamcclelland.

When Janine Stoll, (not just) another Canadian singer-songwriter, begins her song “Means to My End” with the line, “My love, my love, my crazy love we have festering to do,” you know there is something darker going on here than that pretty melody and gentle guitar playing would lead you to believe. When she sings the lyric “erotic I am not” from her song “Novel” in a sultry voice over a sexy afro-beat rhythm of drums and horns, you begin to see a pattern. With a voice reminiscent of Shawn Colvin and a songwriting talent that has given rise to comparisons with Leonard Cohen and Lucinda Williams, Stoll (www.janinestoll.com) is clearly a mature artist, capable of expressing real life paradoxically, the way it comes at you, with all its contrasts, shades and contradictions.