On this debut, twenty-two-year-old Sean Lennon gets jealous, wonders whether he's being pulled down the bathtub drain, obsesses about his girlfriend, jumps on a spaceship, feels restless, listens to country & western and watches what at one point he characterizes as "one hundred weeks" of TV. In the process, Lennon – the son of John Lennon and Yoko Ono – creates a zippy, laid-back, smart-as-shit boho paradise informed by both uptown comfort and downtown adventure. He accomplishes all this in a sweet voice that is almost Brazilian in its confident naturalness and flexibility. It's an unassuming, lived-in kind of voice, and on Into the Sun it works. It unites songs as diverse as the homey "Home" and the spectacularly swingy "Two Fine Lovers"; it renders Lennon as the documentarian of his own life, the only guy to tell his story.

Into the Sun isn't about sound or narrative or – remarkably, these days – other records; it's about the crumbling of pop categories at the end of a century so rich in musical options that stylistic tightfistedness just seems silly. And working with producer Yuka Honda, of Cibo Matto, and a host of resourceful and eclectic New York musicians, Lennon is up to proving this point. The secret behind his effortless-seeming bossa novas ("Into the Sun"), his Sixties Los Angeles valentines ("Queue") and even his subtle sampling ("Bathtub") is that great urban promise of the sonic everything, jazz. "Photosynthesis" and the hypnotic "Sean's Theme" stretch out and live like Gil Evans and the Monday Night Orchestra in baggy jeans and Airwalks. In 1977, Television defined New York music as a white-knuckled exercise in brilliant exclusion; in 1998, Sean Lennon says whoa, slow down, relax, do it all, these days folks have hundreds of channels. All you need is love. (RS 787)

JAMES HUNTER