Looking back and moving forward

A seasoned musician from New Orleans and a sapling "Sinatra in sneakers"–retrophiliacs will find in these two much to enjoy this season. Harry Connick Jr. (the veteran) and Jamie Cullum (the relative newcomer) have put out two new albums: Only You and Twentysomething, respectively. In these works, the Great American Songbook is revisited, reproduced, reconsidered, and even augmented–the last done by an Englishman of only 24 years.

After 15 years in showbiz as crooner, composer, arranger, and actor, Connick needs no introduction. About Only You, there is not much to say, except that it shows us once again why he is the best interpreter of standards today. As singer, he is as suave as ever, and that the album is more blues than brass highlights the fact. His is the kind of voice you want floating in a room even when you’re busy. Connick’s renditions of More, The Very Thought of You and You Don’t Know Me are perfectly "swoonable," each calling to mind the voice of the best crooner in history.

Connick’s resemblance to Sinatra the balladeer is still uncanny even after all these years. But while he runs the risk of sounding like a Sinatra ape, Connick the musician sidesteps Connick the crooner. As arranger and conductor, Connick adds new dimensions to the songs, and this is probably the source of his longevity. In his version of For Once in My Life, swing gives way to something like but not quite tango; and the title track has none of the falsettos of the Platters. We get something low key and smoldering instead, and the effect is to make us wonder whether the song was written last week instead of last century.

As for Cullum, some introduction is in order. Physically, he is the more disheveled (and maybe shorter) version of Lee Brennan (of the defunct 911). Vocally, he reminds one of a raspier Frank Sinatra or of Paul Young and Mick Hucknall (of Simply Red). His creative energy, as vocalist, writer, arranger and instrumentalist is all his own and is impressive. If accounts of his live performances are to be believed, he is even more exciting on stage than in the studio: "I’m not wearing a suit, and I don’t stand still when I’m singing. I’m jumping off the piano." (The photos in the CD jacket suggest all that.)

Twentysomething is his follow up to the self-financed Pointless Nostalgic and is his first release under a major record label. The album takes classic jazz pieces, show tunes, and pop standards and reinterprets them, while staying true to the spirit and style of blues and jazz, for Cullum’s own generation. A few songs in the album are compositions by either Cullum or his brother Ben.

"I’m trying to find out," Cullum explained, "whether you can get 16-year-olds who listen to The Strokes and 20-year-olds who listen to house music to think, ‘Actually, this is cooler than I thought.’" If record sales are an indication, he has succeeded, at least in the U.K. Twentysomething is the fastest-selling jazz album in British history; and as it reveals that its maker is of no ordinary talent, it deserves to be a hit elsewhere.

Although some listeners may find Cullum’s appropriations of old songs too idiosyncratic for comfort, these are at least interesting. The creative intervention, as is the execution, is never perfunctory. Consider Cullum’s decelerated Singin’ in the Rain. His arrangement allows for a little more vocal improvisation than the original, but all the exhilaration of Gene Kelly’s version is kept intact. Cole Porter’s I Get a Kick Out of You becomes a piece set in bouncy ragtime, something one can hardly reconcile with the black-and-white imagine of Ethel Merman singing on a swing. Even at this pace the ingenuity of Porter’s rhyme in one of the stanzas remains–

I’m sure that if

I took even one sniff

That would bore me terrific’lly true.

–to which Cullum calls attention by "scatting" the second time he sings the lines. Cullum’s version of I Could Have Danced All Night starts with an introduction that recalls the tut-tut-tutting of Suzanne Vega’s Tom’s Diner. The overall sound is more funk than ballroom, even with the strings in the background. It is a long way from Julie Andrews, but it is also true to the persona singing it, reflecting as it does the kind of music his generation dances to.

The new materials are just as interesting as the revisions of the old ones. Cullum is capable of writing complex music and intelligent lyrics, which are confessional without being jejune and which betray a sensitivity worthy of an English major (which Cullum was at Reading University). The title song, inspired by an after-dinner conversation he had had with his friends about their "quarter-life crises," begins: "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 proceeds: "Maybe I’ll move back home and pay off my loans / Working nine to five, answering phones / But don’t make me live for Friday nights / Drinking eight pints and getting in fights."

Sarah Vaughan, than whom at improvisation there is none better, once went to see Richard Rodgers after a show. She had, as was her style, looped the last line of My Funny Valentine into so many rainbow-colored ribbons, and she wanted to know what the composer thought of it. "I hope you weren’t upset about My Funny Valentine," she asked Rodgers, "I’ve heard you don’t like it when singers change your songs." Rodgers replied, "That’s correct. I don’t. But you’re a great composer."

So, too, are Cullum and Connick, whether they are writing new songs or rewriting the classics. Each offers music which both looks back and moves forward and speaks to and for almost everyone, whether twentysomething or beyond, in a suit or in sneakers.