A daily chronicle of creativity in film, TV, music, arts, and entertainment, produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from November 2014 – March 2020. Host John Horn leads the conversation, accompanied by the nation's most plugged-in cultural journalists.
British jazz musician Jamie Cullum wasn’t quite 20-years-old when he first burst on the scene. He’s still only 35, but he’s already the best selling jazz artist in the history of the United Kingdom.
Cullum often writes his own material, but he’s best known for putting his distinct spin on well-known songs. That’s evident on his new album, “Interlude,” which is out January 27th on Blue Note Records.
Cullum dropped by the studios of Southern California Public Radio ahead of an appearance on ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live, to talk with The Frame's Oscar Garza about the album.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
On how he found jazz:
In Bristol [England], around the time I was just pre-teens, my brother was a teenager and very heavily involved in the music scene. Things were happening, a lot of DJ culture, sample culture, drum-and-bass, bands like Portishead were just coming out...it's a long way from jazz, you'd think, but actually a lot of the stuff that was being sampled in that music was jazz.
I would hear names like Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis, George Duke...and at the same time, Ben Folds was playing the piano. I know he's obviously not jazz, but that's how the piano came in. Harry Connick Jr, I saw him doing his New Orleans funk stuff, really before I saw him doing his big band things.
I heard a DJ drop in "See-Line Woman" and "Funkier Than a Mosquito's Tweeter" from Nina Simone, and all these things sort of gradually joined the dots for me and I started getting interested in jazz.
On the broad range of songs on "Interlude":
This was a slightly different process than normal, although it does bear the stamp of my other records in the sense that it's quite a wide girth of choices. But this album was really a collaboration with a producer I met, called Ben Lamden, who is a great young U.K. producer who discovered jazz in a very similar way to me. So we're kind of both record geeks.
This album was made in two-and-a-half days. We recorded it live, on the floor, all in one room — no separation, no over-dubs — all into an analog tape machine. What you hear is either a first or second take. There's no editing.
There was a lot of beer drunk when we were making it. The point was to keep it very loose and very dirty and in the spirit of the way these [old jazz] albums used to be made.
On keeping his musical vision intact:
I am lucky in the sense that...I've got the kind of fans that now tend to be interested in the various things that I'm doing. Whether I'm releasing a jazz record or a more original pop-infused record, they tend to be onboard.
But [record] labels need things now that work on radio. And if you call them up and say, "Look, I'm going to make a slightly esoteric jazz vocal record that isn't going to necessarily be like a Michael Bublé record," for example — this is not that type of record.
So I made this record before I even told [a record label] about it. I just thought, Well, I'll make it because I want to make it.
I made [this record] for me. I didn't know what I was going to do with it. I didn't have a label for this record...I had no idea how it was going to come out when I made it. I just knew I wanted to make it. And, fortunately, over the last 10 years, I've had things that have worked. You never know, and you just have to keep searching.