[Dixielandjazz] UK's Top Selling Jazz Artist - Jamie Cullum

[Stephen G Barbone]

Jamie Cullum, who Wikipedia calls "the UK's biggest selling jazz  
artist of all time" fired up Carnegie Hall last Saturday.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband


June 22, 2009 - NY TIMES - By Stephen Holden

The Piano Man Who Hops Atop His Instrument


The brash British piano man Jamie Cullum specializes in quick changes.  
At his Carnegie Hall concert on Saturday evening this charismatic 29- 
year-old star with the hyperkinetic energy of a 15-year-old  
skateboarder was pounding on his Yamaha one minute; the next he was  
jumping on top of it (a little shakily).

At one point he slid across the stage without a board under his  
sneakers, as though he were riding a wave. Later he and several band  
members descended into the audience to perform “Caravan.” As adoring  
(mostly female) fans crowded around him, he leapt onto an aisle seat,  
where he teetered for a second before dismounting.

The old and the new, standards and originals, pop and jazz and various  
hybrids, and even a couple of numbers he described as disco: Mr.  
Cullum offered a shape-shifting potpourri defined more by his  
gregarious personality than by any overriding musical concept. His  
band, which included Chris Hill on bass, Brad Webb on drums, Tom  
Richards on saxophone and Rory Simmons on trumpet and guitar,  
underscored his image as a raucous cutup in arrangements that featured  
sharp blasts on the horns.

On piano Mr. Cullum suggests two parts Billy Joel (his solos are less  
organized, and jazzier, but just as frantic as Mr. Joel’s) to one part  
Harry Connick Jr. (whose playing is rooted in New Orleans traditions  
that Mr. Cullum acknowledges only glancingly). Vocally his raw  
delivery suggests a composite of Mr. Joel and Mr. Connick (tilting  
more toward Mr. Joel) with echoes of the English music hall.

While singing, Mr. Cullum is much more likely than either of those  
forerunners to make impulsive dynamic leaps and to preface songs with  
moments of semiscatted glossolalia. During “I Get a Kick Out of You”  
the actual kick arrived when he sat down hard on the keyboard in the  
bratty musical equivalent of a gotcha moment.

Who knows why he chose to sing “If I Ruled the World,” a stale ’60s  
show tune from the flop musical “Pickwick” that he said he discovered  
on a Tony Bennett record and that he admitted was a bit “twee”; or why  
he sang a tepid swing version of Jimi Hendrix’s “Wind Cries Mary”?

When Mr. Cullum settled down to perform ballads like his original “All  
at Sea,” Bob Dorough’s “But for Now,” his brother Ben Cullum’s “These  
Are the Days” (which suggests a response to Mr. Joel’s “This Is the  
Time”), and the theme from “Gran Torino” (Mr. Cullum wrote the lyrics  
to the Clint Eastwood tune), his reined-in volatility infused his  
singing with emotion.

Prefacing his performance of “Twentysomething,” the title song of his  
2004 album, he noted with rueful good humor that in two months, when  
he turns 30, he won’t perform it on tour anymore.

In this blasé, bebop-flavored swing tune, the young narrator, a  
Shakespeare expert, sorts through possible postcollegiate choices  
(travel? working for the poor? a 9-to-5 job?) and confesses that he  
wants to be famous. It is all so exhausting that he finally decides to  
postpone decision making. “I don’t want to get up/Just let me lie in/ 
Leave me alone, I’m a twentysomething,” he announces. His time has  
finally run out.