Make mine jazz

Jamie Cullum sings a song he wrote titled I Want to be a Popstar in his new album Pointless Nostalgic. It goes like this:

"Why is it all these fakers/ seem to make the morning papers?

They’re selling records by the million/seems so easy in my opinion

Look at the jazz star, he really needs some guts

Playing from seven to midnight/surviving on peanuts

Selling records by the dozen/probably sold his tenor to make ‘em

With artwork designed by his brother/and liner notes by his mother

Told what to do/miming to a tape

While a team of experts make sure you’re looking great

Taking a limo to your own private bar/my God! I want to be a Popstar!"

Cullum hits the bull’s eye with his song but thankfully things are changing. Clever marketing and the David Foster connection has made a star out of Michael Buble with the jazzy swinging sound. Marketing is the game of the moment. A great strategy can sell anything, even ice to the Eskimo. Why do you think Pinoys are buying Chinese albums with songs they do not understand? The answer is marketing. So hopefully, marketing will also help more people take part in the pleasure of listening to the jazz music of Cullum and of Clare Teal. Truth to tell, one of the reasons I greatly enjoyed this past weekend was because of the new albums by these two artists from the UK.

Recently proclaimed the Rising Star for 2003 at the BBC Jazz Awards, Cullum is a singer, arranger, composer and pianist. He is very good looking, only 23 years old and has been dubbed Sinatra in Sneakers because of his music and large female following. He still has to come out in the US of A. Buble, watch out! In fact, a bidding war is going on between two major labels both eager to sign up this kid who combines popstar looks with prodigious music talent.

Luckily for us we do not have to wait for that war to end and get our hands on Cullum’s album. Candid Records has released Pointless Nostalgic in the local market and it is here for us to enjoy. Cullum presents originals I Want to be a Popstar and the title cut and he also tackles standards. His singing harks back to Bobby Darin but is grittier and spiced with a strong rock edge. You and the Night and the Music, I Can’t Get Started, In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning, Too Close for Comfort and others.

I also wish popstar stardom for Clare Teal because everybody should be able to experience her voice, so entrancingly sexy but also of such remarkable clarity. Her new album is titled Orsino’s Songs. The name was derived from Orsino, a character in Shakespeare’s comedy Twelfth Night. He was the one who said "If music be the food of love, play on." Play on indeed and that is what Teal does in the album deftly juggling eras, (1920s to the present), rhythms, (waltz, foxtrot, pop) and composers, (Rodgers and Hart to Gershwin to John and Michelle Phillips and herself) with such ease that she never missed a beat.

Mountain Greenery,The Way You Look Tonight, In the Still of the Night, Blues in the Night, You Make Me Feel So Young, I Only Have Eyes for You, I Love You Porgy plus her very own Life Plans, Let’s Not Take a Raincheck, Ready for Love to Begin and Who Bought the Car. It is a beautiful collection and Orsino would have been very pleased to keep it playing on and on and on.

Rat Pack Collection

Incidentally, a true indication that there is now more interest among the younger listeners in jazz singers and that they are indeed turning into swinging popstars is the eagerly awaited release of CD and DVD editions of live performances by Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis, Jr. The album is titled Live & Swingin: The Ultimate Rat Pack Collection. Sinatra and his gang which included Martin and Davis, were known as The Rat Pack during the ’60s.

It will be a treat watching these great artists perform on DVD and it will do you no harm to find out where the moves, the phrasing, the nonchalance and other qualities found in today’s jazz artists came from.