Review: Hailey Tuck, Glasgow Jazz Festival

Hailey Tuck, St Luke’s, Glasgow, Thursday June 21st  ****

 

The young Texan singer Hailey Tuck, who made her Scottish debut at the Glasgow Jazz Festival on Thursday, is not so much the next Madeleine Peyroux or Melody Gardot as she is their musical lovechild.

 

Like Gardot, she has an assured, controlled, sultry voice and a flair for drama, and like Peyroux, she has a spare, pared-back singing style, a way of hanging back from the beat and making unexpected forays into the upper reaches of her range.

 

Skipping onstage in a Jean Harlow frock and sporting her signature Louise Brooks bob, Tuck won the St Luke’s congregation over with her infectious joie-de-vivre and the self-deprecating humour she revealed as she recounted her escapades in the music world and how she managed to catch the attention of Peyroux and Gardot’s producer, Larry Klein, who produced her debut album.

 

Her storytelling skills were also much in evidence in the way she put over her eclectic programme; the range of song choices inspired – she said – by Klein’s ethos of sitting pop songs alongside jazz standards. So we had a bossa nova take on the Zombies’ Tell Him No, which worked well with Tuck’s sultry, seductive voice, and a brilliant version of Pulp’s Underwear which the coquettish Tuck evocatively brought to life.

 

Less successful were the over-aranged numbers in which Tuck’s vocals were drowned out by her trio, and her strange mutations of the familiar melodies of My Heart Belongs to Daddy and Trouble In Mind. The latter may have been a blues touching on suicide, but – as with every song on Thursday – it was sung with a smile by the kittenish Tuck, the cat who’s got the cream and just can’t hide her delight.

First published in The Herald, Monday June 25th

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Programme

* Don’t Think Twice

* Sunday Morning

* Polka Dots and Moonbeams

* Trouble in Mind

* Alcohol

* Tell Him (Her) No

* So In Love

* Everything Happens To Me

* My Heart Belongs to Daddy

* Cry to Me

* Say You Don’t Mind

* Underwear

* Do You Know What I Means to Miss New Orleans

* St James Infirmary

* After You’ve Gone

* Junk (encore)