British singer Jamie Cullum the latest to explore jazz standards
As Jamie Cullum veers back to jazz, he's part of a wider trend of artists exploring the genre's material in new ways
Jamie Cullum doesn't want anybody to get the wrong idea about his new album, Interlude.
A British singer and piano player who emerged in the early 2000s as a precocious, messy-haired jazz star, Cullum spent the next decade inching ever closer to pop. He wrote original songs and covered Don't Stop the Music by Rihanna, and his previous record, 2013's beat-heavy Momentum, was produced by hip-hop producer Dan the Automator, known for his work with Gorillaz.
So it's easy to view Interlude, a handsome, mostly acoustic collection of standards such as Good Morning Heartache and Make Someone Happy, as a kind of retrenchment. Not so fast.
"I actually worried about putting this one out, because I didn't want to give the impression that I'd got fed up with my process or I felt like it wasn't working," Cullum, 35, said recently. "But there was something I was hungering for that I didn't get from Momentum. That's the jazz musician in me that I'll never escape."
Cullum isn't the only one finding nourishment in an old model. This month, Jose James, another young singer with one foot in jazz and the other outside it, will release Yesterday I Had the Blues, a gorgeously stripped-down set of tunes written by or closely associated with Billie Holiday.
Timed to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Holiday's birth, Yesterday I Had the Blues follows James' 2014 album, While You Were Sleeping, which dabbled in outsized guitars and dance grooves.