British jazz-pop idol Jamie Cullum comes to town

By RUSSELL BAILLIE


The small stage of the Auckland Top of the Pops studio has acquired a whole new storey.

Taking up nearly all of the small performance space, upon which NZ Idol Ben Lummis has had a temporary lease of late, is a very big, very shiny, very black and very heavy grand piano.

It clashes beautifully with the day-glo decor, looking as out of place as a coffin in a shopping mall.

But, of course - with apologies to The Streets - a grand don't come for free.

All the shoving that was required to get it in here is part of an even bigger push - to help Jamie Cullum, singer-pianist and jazz-pop star, become a sales phenomenon on this side of the planet as well.

It's already working.

His major label debut Twentysomething, a million-plus seller in Britain, has conveniently popped into the New Zealand top 10 this week, just as Cullum and entourage hit town.

Though the plan was originally to have some time off after playing in Singapore and Australia, Cullum has been in an Auckland studio recording music for an undisclosed film project.

Which has meant limited time for interviews - this is his only print media one - in between his TOTP taping, and having those piano movers lug his hired instrument on to the stage of the St James for his one-off public show.

Cullum already knows the smell of the old theatre. He was there on Monday for the show by fellow Brits, art-rockers Franz Ferdinand, who he'd seen a few times before at home.

Before we find a quiet spot to talk among the TOTP studio's concrete corridors and dressing rooms, Cullum checks his Blackberry for messages and then there's a polite discussion with the show's director about whether the piano's lid should be up or down for his performance.

Cullum's happy either way, suggesting the sound tech will find it easier if it is down. But it's decided it looks better up.

In person, the 24-year-old is diminutive and pin-up handsome. His complexion is darker than his photos suggest - his mother is Burmese - and he resembles a combination of a young Leonardo DiCaprio and Davy Jones from the Monkees.

He's an engaging talker, with a self-deprecating wit, especially about his abilities as a musician, his big break in the music biz and his reputed million-pound signing to legendary jazz label Verve.

"It's been mad from the day I signed my contract and paid my lawyer almost as much as I was getting. It's been mad, but I am just not the kind of person to respond to madness in a negative way."

There's an intensity apparent which suggests he's a young man in a hurry. If he is in such a rush, who is doing the steering?

"I don't feel there are people pulling the strings, going 'You do that you do that or else'. That's not it at all. The only thing I am aware of is things in the music business can move very quickly and it's all or nothing.

"And what I've got is an ability to play live a lot. I'm used to it because I've been doing it for the last eight years. So while people want to see us live we have to get out there and do it, because people don't become lifelong fans of bands on just two albums.

"People who are going to like Franz Ferdinand for the next 10 years were the people who were there last night. Hopefully the people who will like me for the next 10 years when the whole 'New Jazz' thing has gone will be the people who went to the gig and think 'Yeah I'm still into it'.

"So I am just aware we have to get out there while the iron is hot and make some music."

Cullum's Twentysomething mixes standards, a few Billy Joel-esque originals and lush, ivory-tinkling takes on Jimi Hendrix's The Sky Cries Mary, Radiohead's High and Dry and Jeff Buckley's Lover You Should Have Come Over.

Along with youngsters Amy Winehouse and Katie Melua, Cullum has been touted as being part of a wave of young Brit jazz-ish artists, all part of the industry response to the runaway success of Norah Jones.

Cullum doesn't see Jones as his door-opener.

"Five years ago, would the industry have been interested?" he ponders. "People were responding to what I was doing and buying my records five years ago and I was doing a fairly similar thing and I just got better really.

"I don't think the turning point was necessarily Norah Jones because I didn't present them with a Norah Jones thing.

"Like, would Franz Ferdinand have been signed when Oasis were huge?

"Probably not. The trick is for the artist to just do what he does and then the industry wakes up, or the true musicians are the ones who just get on with it and make their music independently, doing gigs and making albums without being signed by a major label.

"This is my opportunity now to do what I can with a major label. It may last two years. It may last 20. It may last the rest of my life. It may finish after the next album. I don't know. That's the fickle industry."

Another theory to discuss then. Cullum's British success is a reaction to the Idol age of just-add-television pop stardom.

"But I have benefited as much from Idol as the people in Idol, in that I'm just different and that kind of instant fame seems to happen now. Whereas having played live gigs for eight years and making four or five records only got me so far.

"We were marketed in a pop way. It was a jazz record - so that was the hook. They marketed me as a jazz artist: 'He's into pop music and rock music and he's not really a dickhead'. So that was kind of the story."

These days Cullum gets British fans coming up to him whose weddings he played a few years ago when he was a jobbing musician playing in a variety of bands - he plays guitar too - in and around Oxford while attending Reading University.

That led to a couple of months' residency on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean - "We played two hours a night. The rest was party central."

Along the way he developed an affinity for jazz, and thought his career might head that way. But his roots in pop and rock kept getting in the way.

"Two years ago when I started playing jazz I was trying to be much more jazz.

"I even lied in interviews about where I found out about jazz - 'I went through my parents' record collection ... Oscar Peterson from the age of 14'. Bollocks. I was listening to Iron Maiden.

" The first time I heard jazz was on a [hip-hop group] Tribe Called Qwest record. I fell in love with a line on a Pharcyde track which was from Miles Davis' Bitches Brew, so I went out and bought the original album."

On his 2002 album Pointless Nostalgic - some of the tracks of which have been added to the New Zealand edition of Twentysomething - Cullum was crowned the new prince of British jazz.

He says after this year's album he suffered a critical backlash at home for not being jazz enough.

Funnily enough, considering that sales graph, he doesn't particularly care.

As he told the Independent this year: "Someone who is in love with jazz is going to get annoyed when I'm called the greatest British jazz artist alive today, which is fair enough.

"People question whether I'm jazz at all, and I resolutely say I am, but I'm not pushing the boundaries in the usual way.

"I'm pushing the limits of the music in terms of how entertaining and accessible it can be without making lift-music.

"I'm trying to find out 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'."

So that grand piano up there - how does he rate himself on it?

"I'm soulful and passionate and I've got no technique.

"I taught myself and I don't know what I'm doing - just going totally on sound. And when you are playing jazz that can only take you so far. So if my desire was to be the next Keith Jarrett I'd have to take three to five years off and study and work hard and practise."

And sell no albums ...

"Yeah, and that's obviously not my desire."


LOWDOWN

WHO: Jamie Cullum, singer-pianist.

WHAT: Britain's biggest selling jazz artist of all time.

ALSO KNOWN AS: "The David Beckham of Jazz", "Sinatra in sneakers".

BORN: Wiltshire England, 1980.

NOTABLE FANS: An early champion was chatshow host Michael Parkinson. Having seen him on the programme, Prince Charles invited him to play his mum's birthday party at St James' palace last year.

ALBUM: Twentysomething (Verve/Universal), out now.