MUSIC:He's the best-selling UK jazz artist of all time but the purists won't be buying his new album. Not that this seems to bother the indefatigable Jamie Cullum, writes BRIAN BOYD
EVEN THOUGH HE’S now all of 30 years of age, you’d still ask Jamie Cullum for ID before you served him a drink. His boyish facial characteristics spill over into a boyish enthusiasm for music. While nominally a jazz musician, he has no problem playing around with different musical forms: in the past he has covered songs by Radiohead, The White Stripes, Joy Division and even Rihanna.
He first burst into the mainstream with a memorable appearance on Parkinsonin 2003, and since then he has gone on to become, almost unbelievably, the biggest-selling UK jazz artist of all time. Such is his appeal that he has been rather crudely called "the David Beckham of jazz". Cullum is from Essex, and has an honours degree in English literature and film studies. He only came to jazz via hip hop and indie music. "When I was much younger I was really into hip-hop acts such as A Tribe Called Quest, and they would be using jazz samples on their records. I was curious about this type of music so I went out and got all the original records. Jazz, for me, represented freedom, it allowed me to break down barriers and not be so caught up in what is cool, current music and what isn't," he says.
In Dublin for the Guinness Arthur’s Day celebrations, he shows no sign of the previous evening’s excesses as he fidgets around in his Dublin hotel room. He’s here to talk about his new album, The Pursuit, his most mature and rounded work to date. It’s an album that begins with a track featuring the Count Basie Orchestra, which was recorded in Tony Bennett’s studio in New York, and ends with some trip-hop flourishes.
“Typical me, there’s every sort of sound on it,” he says. “There’s stuff that sounds like Cole Porter, stuff that sounds like house music, and a cover of a Rihanna song. I’ve never kidded myself that I’m a 100 per cent jazz musician, but jazz is certainly at the centre of all my albums. I love my pop, dance, hip hop and indie, and I always want to make music that is accessible but at the same time has some intelligence to it.
“Ideally, I’d love it if people who didn’t know that much about jazz heard me and then went off to investigate jazz music for themselves.”
While being generally accepted by the jazz world, Cullum’s huge commercial success and his insistence on not just being a straight-up jazz musician has seen him being ignored by some of jazz’s more purist sentinels. “There are certain jazz publications that simply don’t review me,” he says. “But you’d have to ask them why that is.”
It has been four years since his last album, Catching Tales, and you get the sense that after he had been everywhere and beyond in touring that album, he had some catching up to do with the huge amount of success and recognition that was coming his way.
“I took a lot of time out after all that touring,” he says. “I did a lot of DJing, made some dance music, and I also set up my own recording studio called Terrified Studios in London. The reason I called it that is because all the electronic equipment there terrifies me to death.”
For this new album, he profusely apologises for having to use the musician’s cliche of “getting out of my comfort zone”. “I supposed I wanted to be frightened by the whole experience so I left behind my regular band mates and my regular producer and went over to Los Angeles and hooked up with some amazing musicians.”
Using the horn section that played on Michael Jackson's Thrilleras well as some other luminaries, he set about recording The Pursuit, but couldn't find the exact sound he wanted in certain places.
“Before I had gone to Los Angeles I had put some sketches down musically on this four-track recording machine in my kitchen. When I tried and tried to get a certain piece to work in the studio in Los Angeles, I just gave up and ended up using what I had recorded in my tiny kitchen in London instead. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.”
This album should have been out last year but a chance encounter with Clint Eastwood (a fan of Cullum's music) changed all that. "He asked me to play at the Monterey Jazz Festival and after the gig he gave me the script for his film Gran Torinoand asked me if I could write some music for it. After that, I found myself caught up in the whole whirlwind of promoting the film, so the album got put back a bit, but that worked out well in the end because I got a number of new ideas while working on the Gran Torinosoundtrack." Cullum knows that these days he is also known as "Sophie Dahl's fiancé" – the two are getting married next year – and already he has been in the situation where the press pretend to want to talk to him about his music before the conversation switches to his personal life.
“We’re both in the public eye so I suppose you can only expect that,” he says. “I do find myself going through my schedule very closely these days and putting a line through interviews with certain magazines which I know don’t want to talk to me about the finer points of jazz, but just want some gossip about my relationship. Yes, we’re engaged; yes we’re getting married next year. That’s all there is to it really.”
The Pursuit by Jamie Cullum is out now on Decca
