God
knows, I am fond of Peter Andre. Watching him tear up the dance floor on ‘Strictly’
this year has made me proud of my Greek blood, but whilst he’s undoubtedly a
jolly nice bloke, and his voiceover for the Iceland commercials - even though
he’s advertising food I wouldn’t feed the local stray cats - makes me want to ruffle
his hair, I have to admit, my heart fell into my boots when I heard he’d
recorded a ‘swing’ album.
Peter
is the latest in an increasingly long line of pop stars in the twilight of
their musical popularity who’ve clearly been advised by their management to
record a swing album to pull public interest back in their direction. ‘Swing’,
or ‘easy listening’ that is, because we daren’t call it Jazz, even if it is
lovable ‘Petey’ who’s currently massacring the genre, or people might not want
to buy it.
 |
| 'Retro' mic - check. Suit - check. Skinny tie - check. Jazz 'face' - check. Peter Andre poses for his latest album 'Come Fly with Me'. |
Ok, I haven’t heard any of it yet, but I reckon it’s probably fair to assume that Pete won’t be attempting anything approaching an actual Jazz vocal on this new disc. He may well have wanted to have a bash at a bit of improvisation, but I would be willing to bet he will have been ‘advised’ against it.
For
a while now, confusion has reigned supreme among the music buying public with
regard to what is and what is not Jazz. Many believe they have a Jazz record
collection, when what they actually have is a selection of CDs featuring pop
singers flatly covering Jazz songs, backed up by jobbing Jazz musicians.
It
certainly seems that vocal dexterity is no longer considered a necessary
complement to a Jazz instrumental backdrop. In fact, it seems it’s a positive
hindrance to commercial success. One has only to see the plethora of boppingly
brilliant but poverty-stricken singers on the UK jazz circuit scraping a living
on noisy, disinterested fifty-quid-and-a-plate-of-pasta restaurant gigs, whilst working in
shops and offices during the day to realise that. The instrumentalists can feel
free to unleash musical Hiroshima, but woe betide the singer who flies off into
an improvised scat solo of their own in case it “spoils the song”. You can play
around with the phrasing a bit, but that’s about it. If you want to get signed,
anyway.
And
yet, confusingly and frustratingly, perhaps it is because the very word ‘Jazz’,
with its connotations of smoky basements, black berets, and 'hep cats' seems to
confer instant ‘cool’, that so many singers like to adopt it as a label – at
least on the way down, or better still, on the way up. One such, Gwyneth Herbert, last
seen signed to Jamie Cullum’s label, Universal, was another soft-focus
Sadé-flavoured pop-singer-songwriter riding for success on the tail of a genre
to which she did not truly belong.
A
duo demo dropped into PizzaExpress Jazz Club Dean Street was all it took and
she was snapped up and given the treatment. However, unlike Cullum who had been
paying his dues on the circuit for years before he got his break, young,
model-pretty, blissfully marketable Gwyneth, not having come up through the
tough and exposed academy of the vocal jams around London, drew harsh reviews
for her first week at Ronnie Scott’s, her choice of repertoire - old chestnuts
like ‘Fever’ that had been banned at even the most amateur of open mic sessions
in town - brutally exposing her inexperience.
Her case is far from unique. It seems that for some time now, the UK jazz scene has been acting as a back door for pop singers from which to launch, or revitalise, their careers. It’s good news for the jobbing jazz musicians who are finding tremendous session work backing up these pop singers, but it blurs the lines for the real jazz singers they leave behind in a way that is simply not helpful to vocal artists who may have spent their lives exploring the labyrinthine musical possibilities this genre throws up, and rendering them unwelcome in what should be their own back yard. Music critics often seem to act as bouncers on the door, lauding pop-singers’ gelded renditions of Jazz favourites, whilst turning away real Jazz singers as improperly dressed.
A real Jazz singer is a musical outcast. To be either villified or adored is the true jazz singer’s lot. Anything else is just Easy Listening. Nobody can ever be on the fence about a real Jazz singer. Furthermore, this is nothing new. The late Anita O’Day, Jazz legend, and vocal genius, who cut her teeth singing for the dance marathon contests of the American Depression, was famously sacked from Benny Goodman’s band for improvising. She left saying “everyone knows what the song is, Benny; my job is to style it.”
There was hardly a murmur in the press when Anita finally died in 2006. She was gigging right up to the end, too. In her eighties.
It’s probably a good thing Petey ISN’T a jazz singer. He wouldn’t have had a fraction of the success he has enjoyed thus far if he really was, and he certainly won’t need to haul his snake hips and his microphone out to wine bars to make the rent when he’s 84.
Neither will the X-Factor’s divine Rebecca Ferguson of a few years ago, who, having breezed through the early rounds on a healthy diet of Jazz standards fed to her by mentor Cheryl Cole, along with a Billie Holiday ‘makeover’, went on to achieve appreciable record sales and television commercial offers after the circus had left town.
When
grooming Rebecca, it seemed smart cookie Cheryl arrived at the conclusion that
smooth jazz sells - as long as you don’t call it that. Seemingly in staunch
agreement over this, fellow judge Danii Minogue simply referred to what Rebecca
was singing as: “the style of music that I love”.
So - call it Jazz when it isn’t, and call it anything BUT when it is, and somewhere down the line you’ll sell millions of records.
There’s a lesson in there somewhere...
Emmeline Wyndham © 2015
