Twentysomething (Verve Music Group)
Jamie Cullum
Released May 11, 2004
Grammy Nominee for Best Jazz Vocal Album 2005
YouTube:
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_lqaH4aL8eBYkWhhDetp-vzmq_nM0m-sxY
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/album/6FbhvZweI6o9Szb2j9ls9o?si=RyrsZ-ngSQKBmQxBBoJsFw
About:
It’s a deceptively warm Toronto afternoon in late
March, the tantalizing promise of spring in the air not yet quite fulfilled. Rather
perfect conditions, it seems, for the arrival of Jamie Cullum, in town for a
whirlwind 24-hours of press-hopping and flesh-pressing.
In his native England, the 24-year-old singer-pianist is well established as
the Next Big Thing. With three albums under his slender belt, he’s already
ranked as the biggest-selling British jazz artist in that nation’s history. His
U.K. concerts are sold out months in advance. He has, much to his chagrin, been
hailed as “Sinatra in sneakers” and “the David Beckham of jazz.” Verve has
shelled out 1 million to launch the diminutive wunderkind and his latest disc,
Twentysomething, across North America. He’s poised to eclipse Peter Cincotti,
Michael Buble and perhaps even Harry Connick Jr. in the contemporary
hipster-crooner sweepstakes.
The tantalizingly sweet smell of promise is in the air, but the begging
question is, can Cullum fulfill it?
Spend a couple of hours with the young charmer and the answer-a resounding
“Yes”-becomes obvious.
Like Cincotti, Buble and the wet-behind-the-ears Connick of a decade or so ago,
he backs genuine talent with an endearing blend of brash chutzpah, boyish pluck
and ballsy showmanship-which, in Cullum’s case, means everything from Jerry Lee
Lewis-style keyboard pounding to plucking the piano strings with his left hand
while tickling the ivories with his right and bouncing between tables while
taking healthy sips from patrons’ wineglasses.
But Cullum’s got something the others lack.
It’s the precise same tactical advantage that placed the Beatles a notch above
all the other British Invasion warriors. He is, like John, George, Ringo and
particularly Paul before him, a master of adorable subversion. The Fab Four,
though still struggling in ’64 to find the voice that would ultimately define
their era’s social commentary, spoke both of and for their generation, but did
so in a way that was, unlike the Stones, cleverly unthreatening. Parents didn’t
necessarily comprehend their yeah-yeah sensibility, nor did critics, but both
accepted the mop-topped rockers as a fairly innocent diversion.
So, too, Cullum seems singularly skilled at turning traditional attitudes about
jazz singing (and playing) inside out while simultaneously wooing two (or more)
generations of listeners. Hear him swing through “You’re Nobody Till Somebody
Loves You” with finger-poppin’ Bobby Darin ease, transform a show tune as
silken as “I Could Have Danced All Night” into a gleeful, one-too-many hangover
anthem, gently expose the slacker underbelly of his peers with the self-penned
“Next Year, Baby” then illuminate their collective angst with
“Twentysomething,” and you start to understand there’s a rather bold
revolutionary lurking behind that baby face. The wave that is currently
ushering him into American record stores and onto Stateside playlists isn’t, of
course, anywhere near the tidal variety that landed those four lads from
Liverpool on our shores. Still, I suspect that, five years hence, we’ll have
seen him do more than most to advance the beyond-category, pop-rock-jazz-folk
fusion ignited by Norah Jones and her ilk, and recently fueled by Elvis
Costello’s North and Diana Krall’s The Girl in the Other Room.
A few minutes late for our lunchtime interview, Cullum confesses that he was
sidetracked by the lure of a nearby sports equipment emporium. Showing off his
new “trainers,” he’s giddily excited about how remarkably inexpensive they
were.
Does, we wonder aloud, a rising star with a 1 million pound contract in his
back pocket need be concerned with cheap running shoes?
Ah, the money.
That indelicate topic that radiates like a beacon above his tousled locks.
Turns out, it’s a nonstarter. Cullum isn’t rich, at least not yet. “It’s a load
of bollocks, as we say in England. It only became a news story because of the
paradox of using the words ‘million pounds’ and ‘jazz’ in the same sentence,”
he says, pointing out that the money isn’t his personally, but is instead a
“ballpark figure” of what Verve intends spending in support of Twentysomething.
“I got enough to pay off my student loan and buy myself a new guitar. I’ve
still yet to see any real money connected to this. The only way I’ve earned
anything is through writing my own songs.”
Tracing the backstory of a 24-year-old doesn’t usually
require too much digging. In Cullum’s case, though, his professional evolution
dates back nearly two decades. “When we were very young, my older brother and I
both had piano lessons, [but] I wasn’t interested in the music we were
learning. I was more interested in football and toy soldiers. Music was
something I had no aptitude for. At school I was showing aptitude for a lot of
things like art and English and math. I was quite an academic child. My
brother, conversely, was quite bad at school but very good at music. I looked
up to him quite a lot and when he got his first electric guitar that was my
turning point back into music. I thought guitar was cool, and all the music I
was listening to-Nirvana and Rage Against the Machine and a lot of heavy metal
and then Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin-was guitar-based. Also, guitar was the
thing all the girls wanted to see you play.”
How, then, the leap from Kurt Cobain to Dave Brubeck?
Cullum, who, apart from those childhood piano lessons, has had no formal
instruction, insists that, “jazz kind of filtered into my life by osmosis.
Around age 14, I really started to get into music as an important part of my
life. I was listening to a lot of hip-hop, like the Pharcyde and Public Enemy
and Guru. They, of course, used a lot of jazz samples in what they were doing.
Every time I heard a sax break or a piano break I’d go, ‘That’s cool; that’s
something I haven’t heard before,’ and seek it out, which led me to names like
Herbie Hancock and Oscar Peterson. My mum and dad weren’t jazzheads, but one
day my dad put on Dave Brubeck in the car and I was really hip to his kind of
‘Take Five’ groove. Then I saw Harry Connick Jr., saw this young guy doing what
he was doing and thought, ‘OK, hang on, hold up, what am I missing here?’ So I
started getting some jazz records. The first one was Harry’s trio album Lofty’s
Roach Souffle, which led me to Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington and,
because I was really into the Fender Rhodes, Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters and
Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way. Those were my first four jazz records. From there
I worked backwards, all the way to Jelly Roll Morton. I wasn’t missing
anything, and I was reading everything I could on jazz. By the time I was 17 or
18, my actual knowledge of jazz-not necessarily how to play it-but my knowledge
of the musicians and history was pretty keen.”
Frustrated with lack of time to “translate the music that was going on in my
head to my hands,” Cullum approached his parents with the idea of quitting
school and “hanging out for a year and playing music and getting gigs. They
were kind of cool and said, ‘Well, as long as you get a job and aren’t living
off us,’ so I got a job in a garage and saved up a load of money. Then I got a
gig in a local hotel playing piano in the foyer.”
Wanderlust beckoned, and Cullum ventured to Paris, “to pretend I was Jack
Kerouac and meet some French girls and party and drink red wine. I planned to
stay a week, but stayed for five months, met a girl, fell in love and saw lots
of music. I saw Keith Jarrett there and Dave Douglas and Wynton Marsalis. It
fueled my interest in living a nonmaterialistic kind of artistic life, just
hanging out and being creative and writing and generally being a boho freak.”
Back in England, Cullum began traveling the regional jazz circuit, “playing
four or five nights a week with various sorts of older jazz bands based in
Wiltshire and Bristol and Bath and Swindon.” While sitting in with these
slightly creaky combos, Cullum was presented with a career-altering demand
mighty similar to the one faced a half-century earlier by Nat “King” Cole.
“They invited me back each week as long as I not only played but also sang a
new song.” For a greenhorn jazz singer without a shred of training, there
couldn’t have been a better education. “No one read charts, so I had to know
all the tunes,” he explains. “Everything Ellington, everything Gershwin,
everything Berlin, everything Porter. I learned all those tunes by ear, and
whatever chords I didn’t know were shouted at me during the songs.”
In terms of vocal influences, Cullum confesses, “Kurt Elling became my shrine,
the absolute god of all. I think he is an absolute genius. He is the sum of all
parts that have come before him and has actually transcended the masters. I
think he copied Mark Murphy a great deal but has brought it to the next level
in terms of perfection. I got into Kurt and then got hip to everyone else, from
Jon Hendricks and Mark Murphy on down. Also Andy Bey. He was at Ronnie Scott’s
for a week, and I saw him six nights in a row. I got into huge amounts of debt
going to see Andy Bey! He’s terrific. What I love about him is that he creates
an atmosphere. As soon as he opens his mouth you’re transported to another
place.”
Much has been made in the British press of the foolhardily brave decision by
the 21-year-old Cullum, still largely an unknown in jazz circles, to
self-finance and self-produce his debut album, Heard It All Before. “Well,” he
smiles sheepishly, “I wish it was that cool. I’d made loads of demos with
shitty rock bands and shitty pop bands. I just wanted to do something that was
totally mine, and I thought, ‘Well, no one my age has done an album of jazz
standards played live. We can record it in an afternoon and sell it for 10 quid
at gigs and make loads of cash!’ It cost me about 500 quid to make 500 of them.
I sold them all, and now a single copy of the album is going on eBay for more
than it cost to make the whole thing. It’s actually pretty ironic.”
With the tiny profits from Heard It All Before, Cullum made his first foray
into a studio for the follow-up Pointless Nostalgic. Midway through production
of the disc, a mix of chestnuts like “I Can’t Get Started” and “Too Close for
Comfort” with Radiohead’s “High and Dry” (included on the U.S. pressing of
Twentysomething) and the deliciously tongue-in-cheek original “I Want to Be a
Popstar,” entered Alan Bates-no, not the celebrated British actor, but the
multitalented music exec who founded Candid Records. “Alan heard it at the
nine-track stage,” recalls Cullum, “and said, ‘Oh, look, if you need the money
to finish it, I’d love to put it out.’ Well, for someone who just moved to
London six months earlier and had hopes of maybe playing Ronnie Scott’s and
putting out a proper record within 20 years, it was an opportunity not to be
missed.”
Impressive as the album proved to be, it wasn’t entirely fulfilling for Cullum.
“At the time of making Pointless Nostalgic, I had come to London to be a jazz
musician. I realized afterward that being a jazz musician is only part of what
I want, because I’m influenced by so much other music. I’m as influenced by Tom
Waits, Bob Dylan, all the new dance music, rock music, the Strokes, Kings of
Leon, well-crafted pop music like Avril Lavigne’s and even Britney Spears’
latest single [“Toxic”]. And I want to bring all of that to jazz.
“When I was drawing up the idea for Twentysomething I asked myself, ‘Why can’t
I take my friends to a jazz concert? What’s wrong with jazz?’ Well, there’s
nothing wrong with jazz itself. Maybe it just needs someone who has as much
knowledge of pop and rock music as they do of jazz and can bring all of it
together. Jazz is, of course, the perfect place to do it because it’s the only
music with a wide enough platform. With jazz, you can play soft, loud, wear a
leather jacket, wear a suit, have a mohawk, be polite, swear, be hell-pig
ugly-it doesn’t matter. Jazz isn’t just about improvising over chords. Jazz
encompasses the ability to do anything. It’s this huge, huge universe to
explore.”
Cullum’s refreshingly inclusive attitude may not sit well with jazz purists,
but it did find unexpected support from Diana Krall. Praising her as “someone I
absolutely adore, I love her new record and think it’s exactly the right thing
at the right time because there’s loads of us young pretenders around now
trying to be her,” Cullum recalls meeting Krall at Ronnie Scott’s. “I was very
young, and remember asking her who she likes. She says, ‘Cole Porter and
blah-de-blah’ and names all the jazz people. And I said, ‘Do you like other
songwriters like Tom Waits and Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell?’ She looked at me
with amazement and said, ‘Yes, I do!’ I think she was quite surprised to be
talking to someone, especially a 15-year-old kid who looked about 12, about
that because she only ever gets asked about the other stuff. All those
influences are on her new record and have, I think, been with her long before
she met Elvis. I also think she’s finally successful enough to do whatever the
fuck she wants, and I love that. That’s what I hope for-to make the records I
want to make.”
As with Krall, Cullum’s diversity allows him to tap into a far broader audience
than most jazz artists. “I hope so,” he nods, “because all I ever want to do is
be inclusive. Jazz is my first love. I love Paul Bley and Jack DeJohnette’s
solo percussion records, and listen to everything from bebop to melodic jazz.
But I hate the exclusivity of it. A lot of jazz musicians thrive on the fact
that not a lot of people understand it. That doesn’t work for me. I don’t want
to be an outrageous populist, but I do want to give people something they can
understand. You know, you play a Radiohead tune and somebody recognizes the
chorus and says, ‘Ohhh, great, I love this song’ and then you play a free solo
in the middle and they say, ‘Oh my god, where are you going?’ That can really
excite people. All of a sudden you’ve got 16-year-olds cheering crazy bass
solos!”
Cullum has also got 16-year-olds (and their sixtysomething grandparents)
listening to standards in a whole new way, which is, he says, “really the
point. Take a tune like ‘Stardust.’ I adore that tune, and play it again and
again and again. But I don’t feel I can offer anything new to it at the moment.
Maybe someday the penny will drop. So, instead, I get my head inside a tune like
‘I Get a Kick Out of You’ or ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’ and think, ‘Now,
this is cool.’ I can play this in front of a rock crowd or I can play this in
front of a jazz crowd and it’ll still make sense.
“It is just about making better music. I’ve got my whole life to do it. All I
need is a piano and time. That’s really all I give a shit about.”
Christopher Loudon (JazzTimes)
Track Listing:
1. These Are the Days (Ben Cullum) 3:22
2. Twentysomething (Jamie Cullum) 3:40
3. Wind Cries Mary (Jimi Hendrix) 3:35
4. All at Sea (Jamie Cullum) 4:32
5. Lover, You Should Have Come Over (Jeff Buckley) 4:48
6. Singin’ in the Rain (Nacio Herb Brown / Arthur Freed) 4:06
7. I Get a Kick Out of You (Cole Porter) 4:11
8. Blame It on My Youth (Edward Heyman / Oscar Levant) 3:10
9. High & Dry (Colin Greenwood / Phil Selway / Thom Yorke) 4:18
10. It’s About Time (Ben Cullum) 4:07
11. But for Now (Bob Dorough) 3:55
12. I Could Have Danced All Night (Alan Jay Lerner / Frederick Loewe) 3:25
13. Next Year, Baby (Jamie Cullum) 4:49
14. What a Difference a Day Made (Stanley Adams / María Mendez Grever) 5:12
15. Frontin’ (Shawn Carter / Chad Hugo / Pharrell Williams) featuring: Pharrell Williams 5:35
Personnel:
Jamie Cullum: vocals, piano, electric piano, mellotron, organ, accordion
Alan Barnes: alto saxophone (2, 4, 6, 17)
Jamie Talbot: alto saxophone (10, 11, 13, 14)
David Daniels: cello (5, 6, 7, 14)
Michael Strange: drums (3, 10, 12, 13)
Sebastiaan De Krom: drums (1, 2, 4, 9, 11, 14 to 18)
Geoff Gascoyne: electric bass, acoustic bass
John Paricelli: guitar (1, 3, 7, 10, 13, 17)
Francis Fuster: percussion (1-4, 6, 7, 10, 11, 14)
Ben Castle: tenor saxophone (2, 4, 6, 10, 11, 13, 14, 17)
Mark Nightingale: trombone (6, 17)
Martin Shaw: trumpet, flugelhorn (1, 2, 4, 6, 10, 11, 13, 14, 17)
Oren Marshall: tuba (6, 17)
Bruce White: viola (3, 5-7, 14)
Gavin Wright: violin (3, 5-7, 14)
Jackie Shane: violin (3, 5-7, 14)
Ben Cullum: additional vocals (10, 14)
Recorded and mixed June/July 2003, at Mayfair Studios
Arranged by Geoff Gascoyne, Jamie Cullum
Executive-Producer: Alan Bates
Producer: Stewart Levine
Engineer: Rik Pekkonen, Ferg Peterkin
Mastered by Bernie Grundman
Design: Peacock
Photography by Dean Freeman
Review:
Already a sensation in his native England, 22-year-old piano man Jamie Cullum comes off like a hip amalgamation of Harry Connick, Jr. and Randy Newman on his sophomore effort, Twentysomething. As with Blue Note’s crossover wunderkind Norah Jones, Cullum works best when he’s not trying too hard to please hardcore jazz aficionados, but it’s not too difficult to imagine his bonus-track version of Pharrell Williams’ “Frontin'” turning some jazz fans onto the Neptunes. Showcasing Cullum’s sardonic wit and lounge-savvy attitude, the album deftly flows from singer/songwriter love songs to jazzy barroom romps and reappropriated modern rock tunes. Cullum has a warm voice with a slight rasp that retains a bit of his Brit accent even though his influences — Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Tom Waits — are resolutely American. Truthfully, Cullum isn’t the most accomplished vocalist and his piano chops are pleasant at best — Oscar Peterson he ain’t. That said, he’s still a kick. What he lacks in technique he makes up for in swagger and smarts as many of his original compositions reveal. On the swinging and wickedly humorous title track — a take on postgraduate slackerdom — Cullum sardonically laments, “After years of expensive education, a car full of books and anticipation, I’m an expert on Shakespeare and that’s a hell of a lot but the world don’t need scholars as much as I thought.” It’s a timely statement in our overeducated, underemployed “dot-bomb” economy and deftly posits Cullum as a jazz singer as much of as for his generation. Also compelling are his choices of cover tunes, as he is able to imprint his own persona on the songs while magnifying what made them brilliant to begin with. To these ends, Jeff Buckley’s “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” gets a gut-wrenchingly minimalist treatment and Radiohead’s “High and Dry” comes off as the best Bruce Hornsby song you’ve never heard. Conversely, Cullum treats jazz standards as modern pop tunes, reworking them into contemporary styles that are neither cynical nor awkward. In fact, his atmospheric, ’70s AM pop take on “Singin’ in the Rain,” replete with string backgrounds and Cullum’s percolating Rhodes keyboard, is one of the most appealing cuts on the album, lending the Great American Songbook warhorse an air of virginity.
Matt Collar (AllMusic)
