There are few artists in the past twenty years that have fused jazz, pop, and rock as interestingly, and convincingly, as Jamie Cullum has. After the release of his international hit record Twentysomething in 2003, Cullum has played all over the world in clubs, theatres, palaces, studios, and festivals, thrilling and charming audiences with aggressive piano abilities, tuneful songs, and captivating stage presence. He’s currently on tour in support of his new record, The Pursuit, and will be performing at the House of Blues this Saturday, March 6. The world class entertainer shared a few moments over the phone with The Groove.
Zac Taylor: Hey Jamie, how are you doing?
Jamie Cullum: Well, I’m a little bit on the flu side of good, really. But apart from that I’m fine. I’m well.
ZT: Are you drinking plenty of fluids and Vitamin C?
JC: Yeah, absolutely, all the usual things. Pumping my body full of all that, and I actually have to go back to work tomorrow.
ZT: Well I’m still a student at Berklee, and you’re a big hero of mine. When you were still in college, how did you balance your studies with your music and your social life? Was music always first, or how did you juggle those things?
JC: I think the answer to that is not very well. It was a tough one, because music was essential to me in every way, and I wanted to pass my exams and do well at college, and I wanted to have a social life. So there wasn’t a lot of sleeping involved in my life then. The other thing was, I wasn’t studying music. Music was my part time job, that was the thing that made me enough money to pay the rent, buy books and stuff. I think ultimately, music always won out. I got offered a great gig right before my finals, which took place when my graduation was supposed to be taking place, so that’s probably your answer right there. I think I chose music, because I got offered a great gig and I wanted to do it.
ZT: So were you playing cover gigs, original gigs, and everything?
JC: Well the stuff I was being paid to do was pretty much peoples’ parties, piano bars, weddings, playing in different bands, cover bands, a lot of different things.
ZT: Did you have any other regular part time jobs, or was it all music?
JC: No I was lucky enough to be able to just do music. That’s all I did at the time, which was great. I was kind of doing my own thing on the side, in terms of writing originals, and thinking about doing proper gigs that weren’t just about making money and trying to move forward my musical career. But I didn’t really have a lot of time. It was only one summer I started to record an album of songs to sell at these gigs I was doing to make some extra money and kind of record where I was at.
ZT: The new album sounds great. I downloaded it, legally mind you, and I think it sounds really cool. What parts of your songwriting process have stayed the same over the last ten years, and what parts have evolved? Feel free to be as technical and nerdy as you want with regards to chords, flat nines, melodies, and everything—we can handle it.
JC: Shocking! Great. That’s a really good question, I’ve never really had to answer that before. When I first started out writing songs, there are two distinct times. One when I was really young, and I had a guitar and I knew three or four chords and I wrote very simple little things with terrible lyrics, but they were very simple nonetheless with nice little melodies. And then I started getting quite heavily into jazz piano in my later teens and I started writing very complex things without choruses, with long form songs with drum and bass sections in the middle. Things that would go on for nine or ten minutes. And gradually, I kind of merged the kind of kid that knew three chords on guitar with the guy that knew a lot about flat nines on the piano. I realize that there was a world beyond knowing everything about your instrument when it comes to writing songs, and sometimes a childlike approach to your instrument can be a great way to write songs. So I started actually to write songs without the piano. I would set up a drumbeat on Logic, or just get a loop going, or something like that. Or just try to compose with no instrument at all, just with my voice, and that yielded pretty good results as well. The thing that hasn’t changed at all, is that I always try in every song that I write to do an eyebrow-raising moment, that is basically kind of shoehorning something clever into pop music, even if you don’t realize it. Hopefully in every song that I’ve written, there’s always a kind of clever moment for the musos, you know?
ZT: So when it comes time for the clever moment, the gold coin, of the song, is that when the theory comes back? Do you think, ‘OK, I’ll put an Eb major 7 here, that will really spice things up?’ Or do you just feel it out?
JC: I always feel it out. My knowledge of that stuff is actually really undeveloped. I know how a lot of the stuff sounds. When people talk about it, I don’t necessarily understand it, but if they play it for me, I go ‘I know what you mean there. So that’s what a tritone substitution is. Yeah I do that because Herbie does that.’ And a lot of the stuff I’ve learnt just through feel and trial and error. But a lot of what I do is just fishing. I’ll just fish around and play a bunch of different chords after another chord, and see what sounds best and go with that. So it is definitely more feel-based with me.
ZT: With things like your horn arrangements, are you composing those, or do you sing a part to an arranger or a copyist, or how does that work?
JC: It’s a mixture. On the some of the stuff I think really needs another color, or another ear, I’ll take it to an arranger. But with pretty strong ideas in mind, I’ll already have an idea of the main line, and some of the main harmonies, and they can make it sound a lot cooler for me. And other times I’ll just do it on Logic, print it out, and give it to the horn guys, and they’ll have to work out whether it works or not. But normally I can hear what I want the horns to do, and occasionally my saxophone player, who is a great arranger, will come and re-voice it for me and make it sound fruitier.
ZT: Do you ever look at the Real Book or a standard song and just pick out stuff, steal chords, and mine it for ideas?
JC: Sure, I have a ton of music books. I don’t read notes but I can read chord symbols. A lot of the time just for fun I’ll pull out the Real Book or a Ben Folds or Tom Waits anthology, just sit through and play a bunch of their songs. And then I find that after you play a bunch of songs that great, you tend to be in quite a fertile period. So I won’t necessarily kind of nick those four chords I like, well, that’s not true—maybe I have done that. But writing for me, it’s a good time to do it after you play a bunch of other songs, or listen to a bunch of music, and then just take one tiny idea from a great song you love, and run with it, and that tends to be a great way to write for me, definitely.
ZT: How about when you collaborate with someone like Clint Eastwood or Pharrell, or all these people you get to write with, do you bring in song titles, or a groove, or do you start fresh?
JC: Well, working with Pharrell is quite different than working with Clint, for me for a co-writing session, I’m not massively fond of co-writing sessions that start off with someone going, ‘Right, we’re going to work on this, I’ve already thought it up.’ Probably because I’m the artist and I want it more to come from my head, because it feels more natural for me. I nearly always start co-writing sessions just by jamming with three or four chords, and waiting for some to start improvising over the top, or something like that. Or with Pharrell, he got some beats going and messed around with a couple of chords, and we just started vibing over the top of it, really. And then as soon as one person hits on something cool, you go ‘That’s cool—lets go with that.’
ZT: So when you have an actual session, do you put away four hours or eight hours at a studio or someone’s house, or how does it work?
JC: Yeah, sometimes. I work with this great songwriter named Guy Chambers, and he likes to be quite strict with his co-songwriting times so you meet for three hours in the morning, and then four hours in the afternoon, and you just kind of work on stuff. And then other people, a guy I worked with recently called Ricky Ross, we wrote something in two hours, and that was it, and we went home. And other guys, you jam through the night. And you wake up, you open the door to the studio, and it’s morning, and you realize you’ve been going all night and you’ve written a couple of songs. It varies from writer to writer.
ZT: So what advice would you have for the more jazz-oriented players here at Berklee that play bass, trumpet, or drums or something that want to be hired by someone like you?
JC: Well, it obviously differs from musician to musician, but I’m personally interested in people that have a very wide musical conception. I find it really difficult to meet musicians who have a bigger appreciation for John Coltrane as they do for certain Pussy Cat Doll songs, and I don’t say that for amusement effect. If you can’t appreciate why the hook for ‘Don’t-cha think your girlfriend is hot like me’ is incredible, maybe we’re not supposed to be in the same band. I love to be able to get simple joy from the simple parts of music, but then being able to dig deeper. And the great thing about having training as a jazz musician, you know how to go deep, from chord one, you can go outside, you can substitute this, and that to me is a wonderful thing. But you need to work up to it. And if I can get a drummer and bass player and say ‘I want this tune to sound like a modal sheets of sound thing, but I want you to quote a bit of Timbaland drum loop in this bit.’ And if they can translate that, I think that’s a great thing. Because we’ve got to move this music on and whether you do that by melding it with classical music, or melding it with music that’s happening today, whether it’s pop music or more contemporary classical music. Conception is different for each person, but I really like a musician who listens and plays widely. Who has technique, but can occasionally forget that and get down and dirty. There’s nothing worse than hearing a jazz musician not nailing the backbeat, who plays terrible kind of fills. Sometimes you just need two hits on a tom, and you’re there. It’s great to get into one thing entirely, and you should do that, but I think its great to have really open ears as well.
ZT: What advice do you have for people who want to be a bandleader and songwriter like you? I suppose that advice applies, but what else do you want to add for someone who wants to be a frontman?
JC: Well no, that’s pretty simple. Just get out there and do it. Don’t wait till you’ve learnt that bit, don’t wait till you’ve done this, don’t wait till you’ve worked another year. If you feel like you’ve got something to say, get out there and say it. Don’t wait. You can be playing in front of two people, because the biggest lessons are learned on the bandstand.
ZT: I saw you play in Barcelona four years ago at that beautiful Greek Theatre on Montjuïc. Do you remember that?
JC: Oh God, yeah I remember, everyone was dancing on the stage at the end?
ZT: Yeah! I was there. That was a wonderful show. You give a lot to the crowd. You have great energy. You bring everyone into it. What does that fulfill for you as a performer?
JC: Well, I’m just following my instincts really. It’s not easy to put into words what it fulfills for me. When I get onstage, I just try to be truthful about what I’m trying to do, and I guess I’m naturally quite an open and inclusive person, and I do take great joy in feeling like I’m including people, and I guess a lot of contemporary music maybe takes great pleasure in excluding people, or at least pretending to exclude people. I’ve always quite enjoyed drawing people in. So I think its quite a natural thing for me to do.
ZT: I love the cover songs you choose. But have you ever chosen a cover song that you brought to your band, and they said ‘Jamie. Come on man. We can’t do this one, this is too much.’
JC: Well, do you know they beginning to Charlie Parker’s “All the Things You Are?” [sings melody]. Well I tried to mix that up with a version of “Highway to Hell” by AC/DC. And that definitely didn’t work. I dreamed about it, and in my dream it worked really well. But in reality, it wasn’t happening.
ZT: I bet you have a ridiculous collection of vinyl records.
JC: Yeah I do. I have a pretty thick collection of records. It’s getting out of hand, actually. I just got married, so I’m not sure it’s going to grow quite as quickly as before. I’ve got a couple thousand vinyls, and probably twice that in CDs. I know things are going another way, but I do love to play records still. That’s for sure.
ZT: What are some of your favorite records that you’ve worn down to a thin wafer of vinyl?
JC: That’s a very, very tough question. I picked up an original Miles Whitney record, ‘It’s Your Thing,’ which I love. Some techno from the early days of Berlin from a guy called Maurizio and Basic Channel I’ve pretty much worn out. I’ve got this old Miles Davis playing with Bad Groove with Milt Jackson that’s on the original pressing that’s super heavy old vinyl that you can break real easily, which I’ve played a lot. A lot of stuff, I would have to go on all day.
ZT: You have that new song called “Mixtape,” and you talk about everything from Nine Inch Nails to Louis Armstrong. If you got out your ipod or whatever you use, what would be on the most recent on-the-go playlist?
JC: It would probably some stuff from the new Massive Attack album, Heligoland. Probably some stuff from the new Hot Chip album. Some Mad Libs stuff.
ZT: What irks you about today’s music industry? We all love music here, but we’re all a bit intimidated to jump into it, but here we go. What’s something that gets on your nerves?
JC: Well, cliques always exits. It’s human nature to kind of group certain people together and decide that’s where they live. I think I often find myself, not so much in America, but in other places, trying to get out of a certain box that people put you in. People hear you sing a standard once and they assume you’re trying to be like Michael Bublé, or something. Which is not a problem, but it can be if you’re trying to reach in different places. I think it can be quite tricky, but if you don’t get hung up on that, and just play and go do your thing, forget about all that stuff, and if you do it with belief and truth, people will find what you’re doing, and the right people will find what you’re doing. You can get really famous really quickly, but that doesn’t necessarily lead to a long-lasting fan base that will be watching you for the next 20 or 30 years. Some people go on about how the music industry is dying, it’s not. We’re not going to make as much money as we used to, but its certainly not dying, I think it’s as healthy is ever.
ZT: What else gives you hope along those lines? You’ve been at it for ten years professionally, what do you wish that you had when you were starting out that we have now?
JC: One of the things we can look forward to is that pretty soon there won’t be that traditional artist who makes album, tours, then disappears for two years; and then that artist makes another album, tours, disappears for four years. I think what you’ll get from most artists because of the way we’ll consume our music, is that they’ll do a session, and then release it. And then do another session, and release it. There won’t be a big gap and a big wait for the next massive artistic statement. I hope that the trickle of music from artists who are then freed of the traditional record label structure will just keep releasing music. And in a way, that kind of used to happen. You’d get two albums from Bob Dylan in 12 months, because one session produced all this music. You couldn’t fit it all on one album, so they released one album at the beginning of the year, one at the end of the year. And I think that kind of more continual flow of music will part of what were doing. And I think Radiohead are already hinting at doing things like that. I think that’s a good thing.
ZT: Cool. Final question. Who would win in fist fight—you or Michael Bublé?
JC: Ha. Well, I’m a very fast runner so I don’t know whether we’d get to find that one out. But of course it would definitely be me.
ZT: Excellent. Well thanks a lot for talking to me. I’m looking forward to seeing your show on March 6, and I’m going to have my Berklee crew with me.
JC: Well, we better make sure our chops are in order!
