Colin Steele: Joni, Mary and All That Jazz!

One of the most magical moments at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe came from the bowels of Chambers Street where a room-ful of punters could be heard softly singing Feed the Birds, the beautiful ballad from the Disney film Mary Poppins – to the accompaniment of two of Scotland’s leading jazz musicians as they performed their Poppins-themed show at the Jazz Bar.

This hour-long concert – which united tiny tots, senior citizens, hippies, hipsters, seasoned Fringe-goers, diehard Disney fans and jaded jazzers in song – became one of those shows which grew busier as its run went on. Word of mouth boosted its ticket sales and the memory of how special it was prompted its stars – the duo of trumpeter Colin Steele and pianist Brian Kellock – to be persuaded to revive it for this year’s Fringe, for just two performances.

But Mary Poppins, the jazz version, is just one of a raft of diverse gigs that Steele is preparing for. While other dads might be looking forward to easing off work during the school holidays, Steele is limbering up for the busiest couple of months in his calendar.

The acclaimed 51-year-old jazz musician – and father of three – is bracing himself for a festival season which this year sees him headlining two concerts at the Edinburgh Jazz Festival (and serving as sideman on a further seven) and four shows (each with multiple performances) at the Fringe, plus so many as a sideman that he has already lost count. “Some days I have three gigs,” he says, “so I’m practising like crazy, building up the chops.”

Steele – who has just spent the weekend zooming between the Glasgow Jazz Festival, where he played in up-and-coming singer Georgia Cecile’s band; Loch Lomond, where he is renovating a holiday house, and his hometown where he had gigs at both the Barony Bar and Soderberg – seems to be ahead of the game in terms of building up his stamina for mid July. But it’s not something he takes for granted, having suffered a catastrophic crisis with his playing ten years ago.

Left unable to play, he had to re-learn his craft and he is now much more aware that he shouldn’t push himself too hard. “Nowadays, I know that if it’s not working, then I need to put the trumpet away for a bit. I used to get anxious and push myself too far and it would all collapse,” he explains.

As his busy, cross-country weekend and heavy Fringe schedule illustrate, Steele is an extremely versatile musician who is at home in any number of jazz settings and has absorbed inspiration from a vast range of horn players. He cites Chet Baker – whose, cool, swinging, pared-back “West Coast” sound he channels with ease – as his biggest influence, and names Louis Armstrong, “whose creativity, originality and emotional playing is second to none”, as his favourite trumpeter. It was playing Baker-style jazz that made Steele’s name back in the 1990s, but recently he has played more traditional jazz thanks to his membership of various bands led by the singer Alison Affleck, a tireless champion of early styles of jazz.

[Affleck, Steele and their cohorts may have helped to fuel the revival of interest in traditional jazz in Scotland but it has,unfortunately been pounced upon, rather cynically, by some musicians who seem to view it as a way of landing gigs, rather than because it’s an area of jazz that they are passionate about and well-versed in. Even more disheartening is the fact that jazz festivals are lowering their standards by booking these groups which have jumped on the trad bandwagon.]

Under his own name, Steele has performed and recorded Celtic/folk-influenced jazz with his own band. At last year’s Edinburgh Jazz Festival, he acknowledged his past forays into pop by performing a jazz concert of music by the Glasgow band The Pearlfishers, on ten of whose records he had played. The success of the Pearlfishers project – the concerts and a very well-received album – inspired another pop-themed jazz project for this year’s festival: the Colin Steele Quartet Play Joni Mitchell.

“I’ve had a deep love for Joni Mitchell for a long time; I’d always known her music – and I felt her songs deserved to be better appreciated. She’s known primarily as a poet, but her melodies are fab and stand on their own two feet. Plus, there’s already a jazz connection because she worked quite often with jazz musicians – Charles Mingus, Michael Brecker and Jaco Pastorius are just some of the jazz guys she worked with.”

There were other contenders for this next jazz-meets-pop project, however. “Ricky Lee Jones was high up on the list too,” says Steele before returning to the subject of how he convinced himself that the Joni Mitchell idea could work. “Actually,” he explains, “I probably wouldn’t have gone for this Joni Mitchell idea had Brian Kellock and I not done the music of Mary Poppins at the Fringe last year. It’s so far away from jazz – it just shows what you can do. Someone said to me after the Mary Poppins show that if you can make something as fab as that out of Mary Poppins, then you can do anything. It’s all about melody, and if you have a really strong melody, then it will work. Also, Brian can make anything possible!”

Over the last five years, the Steele-Kellock double act has become a fixture on the Fringe; the two longstanding friends and colleagues seeing it as an opportunity to explore themes or songbooks that they hadn’t delved into before, and to harness the anything-goes spirit of the Fringe to up the level of spontaneity and fun. And, of course, to make a feature of audience participation.

Steele recalls: “The first Fringe show we did together was My Fair Lady in 2014, then the following year, Brian suggested that we do a Glenn Miller show and it sort of took off from there; it became an annual jamboree. It just worked so well; the audience loved it. We had air raid sirens, singalongs (Pennsylvania 65000 etc) and everybody knew a lot of the tunes. The strength of the melody and the arrangements are so great, and playing that music in a small group gives you so much space. When I’ve played it in a big band, I’ve not been satisfied because you can’t really be creative – and I do like to improvise.”

In 2018, Steele and Kellock retired the Glenn Miller show so they could concentrate on their Mary Poppins one. Its slow sales at the outset suggested that there was some ambivalence that it would work but ultimately it assumed the status of being one of those shows that people kick themselves for having missed because those who were there talk about it as a life-enhancing event.

Steele says: “On the fifth and final day, there was a big group of musicians who came in and they said it was the best, most fun, gig they’d ever seen and I felt that way too. It really was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life – everyone singing Feed the Birds. It was so special. I felt it would be a shame not to do it again.”

In addition to reviving Glenn Miller for the Edinburgh Jazz Festival and Mary Poppins for this year’s Fringe, Steele and Kellock are celebrating two of the original giants of jazz – Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington – in another Fringe show that will have five outings.

What is it about working in a duo that so appeals to Steele?  “There’s a real intimacy and a responsibility that you both have – you can’t take a back seat. It’s lovely to work with someone with such musicality and of course you have to remember that there’s also the beauty of no drummer! There’s so much space because there’s no drummer. Anything can happen in duos. With three or four people it’s more complicated. The duo offers more possibilities, more freedom but also harder work – there’s a lot of sweat going on.

“I’ve no doubt that Brian is the greatest of all Scottish jazz musicians and we’re so lucky to have him and I’m so honoured to play with him. We all feel that. It’s always a challenge: he’s not an accompanist – he’s there for the creativity, he’s always pushing. I’m more reticent, he pushes you into different areas. It’s always scary, always a joy.”

*Colin Steele plays the Edinburgh Jazz Festival on July 15 (Glenn Miller, with Brian Kellock) and 17 (Joni Mitchell with his own group); www.edinburghjazzfestival.com for details. For details of his various Fringe shows, visit www.edfringe.com ; Mary Poppins is on August 18 and 20.

Carol Kidd: Doing It Her Way

Carol Kidd at the 2016 Glasgow Jazz Festival (c) Sean Purser

If there was a stand-out artiste in last year’s star-studded gala concert to mark the 40^thanniversary of the Edinburgh Jazz Festival it was undoubtedly Carol Kidd, the irrepressible and internationally renowned Glaswegian singer whose powerful renditions of a couple of ballads brought the house down at the end of the first half and triggered a Mexican wave of sniffles across the auditorium.

The two songs which sent moist-eyed listeners scurrying for reinforcements on the Kleenex front were both new to her repertoire, and were among seven tracks she had just recorded for her new CD, Both Sides Now, which is released this spring. Live, at the concert, they revealed that Kidd has still got it. The voice is as commanding, clear and pure as ever, and her way of bringing a song to life is as spellbinding as it’s always been. 

 Which is not something you can say of many jazz singers who are pushing 75. Indeed, there are not many jazz singers who their seventies and still have the “chops” that Kidd – who has always been a cut above the competition –  has. Although she may have had more than her fair share of woes they haven’t taken their toll on her voice. They’ve only shaped her attitude – and her current attitude is to keep on singing until she knows it’s time to stop. 

 This, she explains from her home in Majorca, was very much in her mind when she began to think about the new album. “Most of the tracks on it are songs I’ve been listening to over the last couple of years, real gems, and I thought I’d better get round to recording them – I’m not getting any younger. Whereas sometimes you have a theme in mind for an album, or are asked to do it, this one came from the songs – they were the starting point, and they were what got me into that studio.”

 One of the Edinburgh stand-out songs was a Billy Joel ballad And So It Goes, which Joel wrote in the early 1980s, and recorded in 1990 and which was recorded a few years ago by Alan Cumming. How did she come across it?

 “Well, my daughter Carol is always listening to music on Spotify and we’ll sit together and we go through it looking for ideas. Last February we listened to lots of different stuff and came across this Billy Joel song I’d never heard before – I think it’s one of his best songs.” 

 It certainly comes over as a perfect fit for the singer who has often delved into the works of contemporary singer-songwriters for material and blended them into her unique repertoire alongside the Great American Songbook stalwarts. So, a typical Kidd concert at any point in the last 30 years might have been mostly standards by the likes of Porter, Gershwin and Rodgers & Hart but with songs by Randy Newman, Eva Cassidy, Sting or Don Henley also represented, depending on what she had been listening to. 

But doesn’t the Billy Joel number have a male point of view – this ballad about someone who’s been hurt and risks letting a new love slip through his fingers because he’s scared? “Oh no,” insists Kidd. “To me it’s just life. It applies to everybody, everybody has gone through that – kept too much to themselves and then they get in a situation where it’s ‘Do you want to be with me coz I want to be with you?’ I sang it from my point of view. I was blown away by the response I got when I sang it at the jazz festival.”

 Both And So It Goes and the other “new” song introduced in Edinburgh – Something Wonderful, from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s score for The King and I (“What a song! We came across that when we were listening to movie themes on Spotify ..”) – were performed and recorded as duets with pianist Paul Harrison and could easily have come from any number of Kidd’s previous albums. But you wouldn’t describe this new CD as a jazz record – it is a distinctive mix of pop power ballad, folk, country & western and jazz and features such well-kent names as regular collaborator and former Wet Wet Wet member Graeme Duffin, on guitars, bass and drums and jazz and folk fiddle player Seonaid Aitken. 

 Kidd says: “Some of the tracks are quite Celtic-y – and I wanted it to be like that. For others, I wanted to have strings. When it came to the title song, Both Sides Now, I wanted a really full-on arrangement. I wanted it to sound wacky and really strange – because life is strange. I wanted the whole background to be strange.”

 Had Joni Mitchell’s classic Both Sides Now been a favourite since she first heard it? “Well, when she did it, with just guitar, I liked the song – but she was a young girl then. I wanted it to be me as a mature woman, having lived my life. It’s like Sinatra’s My Way – I’ve been through all of this, all the ups and downs, the highs and lows. And I still don’t have a bloody clue! It had to be the title track because the album is a sort of life story which reflects where I am and how I feel.”

 Has Kidd’s way of selecting songs changed as she has aged? Does she now feel that it’s a similar sort of challenge to the one faced by older actresses who decry the shortage of meaty roles for their age group? “Yes! I am very conscious of the fact that I am now older and that a lot of songs don’t suit me any more. I choose songs according to my age. I don’t want to be mutton dressed as lamb! I want to deal with my life as it is now – I can’t sing silly boy-meets-girl songs in my seventies. I need lyrics which are more mature and have more substance.”

 Sometimes this need to reflect where she is in her life means that Kidd has to tinker with existing lyrics in order to make them work for her now. This was the case with the song with which she is most strongly associated –When I Dream. Twenty years ago, her recording of Sandy Mason’s haunting ballad was picked to be on the soundtrack of a Korean blockbuster action movie, the success of which catapulted her to the top of the charts over there, and elevated her to superstar status in Asia. But by last year, she had begun to wonder if she might have outgrown one phrase in it.

The line goes ‘I can go to bed alone and never know his name’ and I thought: ‘Aw come on. I’m too old for that!’ So I changed it to ‘and never speak his name’. So this is the mature version of When I Dream!”

 One name that’s missing from the list of singer-songwriters featured on the album is Carol Kidd’s. She has previously recorded a handful of her own songs, most recently the title track of Tell Me Once Again, her acclaimed 2011 duo album with guitarist Nigel Clark – the last studio recording she did. But these days, her regular creative outlet tends to be painting, the art form which brought her back from “the depths” in the years following her partner John’s sudden death back in the early 2000s, and which helped her again when she was undergoing treatment for breast cancer five years ago. “That’s twice it’s done it for me,” she laughs.

 In 2014, she was invited to stage her first exhibition, in Glasgow, and since then, painting has increasingly consumed her time. “I’m doing more painting than ever,” she explains. “And I’ve sold more paintings than ever just recently. It’s proving more lucrative than singing at the moment, especially since I can’t get many gigs in the winter as the flights from Majorca are a nightmare.” 

 But for the moment, Kidd is enjoying promoting Both Sides Now and looking forward to trying to get some concerts scheduled with the featured line-up. “I love this record,” she says, “I really love it. My daughter said ‘Your heart is smiling in it’ – and she’s right because I was enjoying making it so much; enjoying choosing the songs myself rather than being told to do them, and enjoying singing songs by songwriters I adore.”

 * Both Sides Now is out now, downloadable from www.carolkidd.bandcamp.com and on CD from www.carolkidd.co.uk

(c) Alison Kerr, 2019