The 'J' Word: it don't mean a thing...

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

Vague Magazine 2013 - It's all good...

Vague Magazine

Emma Blake dares say...

Saturday, 22 June 2013

It's ALL good...

It’s all over for David Dinsmore. Come Monday, he’ll be the new Editor of The Daily Tits (aka The Sun), and as he has gone into print to say: “"there's no better job in journalism" I guess the only way from there for him is down. 

I’d like to think that if I were a journalist, I would be aiming a little higher, something along the lines of a Robert Fisk, or Anne Leslie, but then again, it seems that at least these days, what most people believe to be aiming “high” is highly relative. 

Way back in the 1990s when I was a “sassy and risk-taking” chick jazz singer on the London ‘scene’, and politicians were all still people who were older than me, I received a call from a piano player who was looking for someone to do a duo gig with him at some restaurant up in Hampstead.

“What’s the money?” Was my first question.

“£70. Plus they’ll feed us” he said.

“Lemme check my diary and get back to you.” I said.

I then called around my musician friends to ask about this guy. I’d never heard of him, so I needed to know if he was any good; could he read, could he keep time – that sort of thing. Nobody had heard of him however, and couldn’t give me any kind of a steer as to what to expect. Finally, I called my usual bass player and he exploded into laughter on the other end of the ‘phone. 

“Ha ha! He’s TERRIBLE!” He chuckled. 

“Oh God...” I began.

“Take the gig, Em...” he carried on, “you’ll be ok. He knows a few chords and you’re good enough to busk it to keep it together, but just don’t look at him when you’re singing or you’ll wet yourself.”

“Why?” I asked, desperate.

“I’m not going to tell you. Best you find out for yourself, but just remember, I warned you...”

And with that, he left me to call the guy back to confirm. 

I confirmed.

I showed up professionally early to the gig in my little black Mini Mayfair with my charts (music) and my mic stand and my honed professional manner. He was already in a state. Nerves. Panic. Fumbling with the leads on the back of his keyboard, dropping stuff. I waited until he was completely ready before plugging my mic in to his amp to soundcheck in the last three minutes before we were actually due to hit. 

Halfway through the first number, I couldn’t resist a peek to see what was going on behind me when he took his solo. He was like Animal at the drum kit on The Muppets. Flailing, hammering, sweating, gurning. He looked like he was giving birth to a wasps’ nest. It was a sight to behold. Sometimes the lower lip was almost touching the keys, I was fairly sure he went cross-eyed at one point. The point though, was that the impression he gave to the audience was that playing the piano was the most difficult thing in the entire world.

Meanwhile, I was up at the mic giving the impression that singing complex rhythms, stretching phrasing, improvising, and providing hook after hook for this lunatic to keep to the beat was the easiest thing in the world.

I have never been so exhausted in my life. It was an ordeal. Singing percussively and snapping my fingers and beating my bangles on the mic stand in such a way that this berk could keep up and sound halfway listenable had all but wrung me out, but all the while, my smooth jazzness and my smug jazz grin never wavered. Not once. Brought up in a theatrical family, to let the audience “see the wheels going ‘round” in a performance was akin to drowning kittens down the bog. Anathema. Unspeakable. No matter what is going on, you present a professional front to the audience.

When it was all over, I staggered to the bar for a bucket of Merlot.

To my annoyance,  I watched as members of the audience lined up to congratulate HIM on his “amazing” performance and offered to buy him drinks. Not one of the bastards offered one to me.

It was a salient lesson. That night, I learned that very few people out there seem to be able to tell the difference between good, mediocre, and downright appalling. It seems the fact that anyone can get up on stage and do anything at ALL seems to please most people to the point of pant-wetting amazement.

I learned too, that if you strive for perfection, if you work to be the best you can be, if you practice and rehearse and try stuff and reject stuff before you present it, be sure you understand you’re doing it for yourself alone. If anyone notices, that’s nice, but essentially, the only person it’s going to matter to... is you.

If however, you're one of the rare and wonderful people who does notice, and delight in it when someone has gone to the bother of learning their craft in the service of your entertainment, no need for a fanfare, or even a song and dance; just buy ‘em a drink.

Posted by Emma Blake at 13:45