Luca Manning: Rising Star

Luca Manning may only have left school two years ago, but the young jazz singer with the soulful, gentle voice already has an award on his mantelpiece (Rising Star at the 2018 Scottish Jazz Awards), a debut CD to sell, a CV that many older singers would kill for, a star-studded roster of admirers, and a dedicated entourage which includes a well-kent face from TV.

Manning, you see, is the grandson of Anita – the colourful Glasgow antiques expert on Bargain Hunt – and over the last few years, she and her daughter, Luca’s mother, have become regulars at jazz concerts in Glasgow. Indeed, from being what she described as a “rock ‘n’ roll gal,” Anita Manning now has an impressive jazz collection (“she has loads of Ella Fitzgerald records”) and has helped her grandson by offering him tips on performance, dealing with nerves and keeping energy levels up. “ ‘Eat bananas’ is her top tip for an energy boost,” laughs Manning.

It was always obvious to Luca Manning that his future lay in music – but he only discovered jazz relatively recently. Born in Glasgow’s west end, he attended Hillhead High School where, initially, he dreamt of becoming a rock star – not that he was very keen on practising his guitar.

“I was in a pop/rock band playing ukulele and writing sad songs with four chords,” he says. “I was in a choir in first year – I had a high voice and had to sing with the sopranos. The school had a fantastic, dedicated music department and there was always an outlet for music.”

At home, Manning’s listening tastes were much influenced by his mother who raised him and his older sister by herself. “Mum, who of course is now into jazz, always liked amazing voices – Sinead O’Connor, Jimmy Sommerville, people like that. Great singers with big voices. I went through a lot of phases but the constants were Amy Winehouse (who I think Anita liked first!), Stevie Wonder and soul music. I bought my first album with my mum in Fopp on Byres Road. It was Bjork – Debut and my mum said: ‘If you don’t get it, I’ll get it!’ I think I was 14 at the time.”

Meanwhile, Manning was taking piano lessons, having given up on guitar, and was encouraged by his piano teacher to sing. “I was actually champing at the bit to get singing lessons but I didn’t get any until my voice had broken”.

When Manning was 16 years old, his school suggested he sign up for the weekly jazz workshops run by the Strathclyde Youth Jazz Orchestra. One of his tutors there was the pianist Alan Benzie, and when the course ended, Manning was desperate to continue learning, so Benzie took him on as a student. It was he who helped the youngster with auditions and prescribed listening material for him. “Until I did the SYJO classes, I knew very little about jazz and didn’t really know what I was getting into,” says Manning. “But the more I immersed myself in the music – the more I loved it.”

Among Manning’s early favourites was the iconic Chet Baker, whose eponymous 1959 album he will be celebrating at The Blue Arrow in Glasgow next month, as part of the club’s 59:60 series of homages to classic albums from that pivotal year in jazz.

“I instantly fell in love with Chet, both his singing and his trumpet playing,” explains Manning. I love that melancholy fragility and vulnerability; I have an emotional connection to Chet. Crooners never resonated as much with me as much. Mark Murphy’s later records are in the same vein as Chet’s – it’s a different style but he’s not afraid to stick his neck out, be himself, take risks. I also love Amy Winehouse – in fact, I think I got into her because my gran Anita was always playing her records.”

The summer school run by the National Youth Jazz Orchestra of Scotland proved another invaluable experience for Manning. “I just loved learning. Jazz was like a new musical language, and I remember that it was after that summer school that I came back and told my mum I want to be a jazz musician.” Manning returned to the summer school a further two times, and one of those occasions it led to him appearing at the Proms as part of a choir of students from the course.

Along with Alan Benzie, the much-loved English singer Liane Carroll played a huge part in Manning’s development. Not only did she point him in the direction of the vocal jazz workshops run in Scotland by fellow singer Sophie Bancroft – with tutors including herself, Sara Colman and Fionna Duncan – but she also invited him to sing with her at her Christmas show at Ronnie Scott’s in 2017. She is, as Manning says, “a very generous person and musician”.

Carroll has also been a significant influence on the young vocalist. “Her singing is so honest; every word is so true and she just makes you feel something. No matter which genre she’s singing in, you are guaranteed to be told a story and she has so much fun onstage doing it. It’s infectious. She’s a very natural improviser which I love as well.”

It was during a particular listening phase around 18 months ago, that Manning – who is currently midway through the four-year jazz course at Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London – had the surreal experience of being invited to support the singer in question at a jazz festival gig.

He explains: “I was really getting into Georgie Fame – I love his Portrait of Chet album; he’s an amazing singer – and was listening to him a lot early in 2018. I sang one of his vocalese numbers at the launch of The Blue Arrow club and Jill Rodger, the director of the Glasgow Jazz Festival, heard me and said: ‘Georgie Fame is playing at the jazz festival this year. How would you like to open for him?’”

And so it was that Manning and the similarly youthful pianist Fergus McCreadie came to be the support act for Fame last year, and then Ruby Turner this summer. (The pair have now, separately, been nominated in the Newcomer category of the prestigious Parliementary Awards, taking place in London in December.) Understandably, this was a pretty daunting experience, but Manning took his cue from his more experienced, then 20-year-old, musical partner. “We decided not to tailor the music to the person we were supporting. Fergus reminded me never to compromise as a musician. He said: ‘Let’s just do our thing unapologetically’.”

It’s little wonder, given the trust he has in McCreadie, that Manning chose to record his debut CD, When the Sun Comes Out, with him earlier this year. The original idea was not to record an album, but just to make some recordings together. “Sara Colman, my mentor and tutor at Guildhall, and I had spoken a lot and she suggested we go in and record enough material so I could make a CD if I wanted. We recorded at the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland’s HQ – a room that we were already familiar with – and that was a great way of minimising stress, by being in familiar surroundings. Sara sat in on the recording and helped produce which also helped me feel more comfortable and confident.”

His confidence was further boosted by the involvement of leading alto saxophonist Laura Macdonald, who had given him sax lessons at school before he took up singing. “I love her energy and her playing. We’ve always stayed in touch, and she has been a really good mentor to me. I wanted to have a duo on the CD – but then I thought it would be nice to have a guest and Laura was the first person to come into my head. And it was the idea of having her, rather than the idea of a sax. It turned out just as I envisaged: she came in on the second day and completely changed the energy. I was almost pinching myself. Everyone in the room loved it. Fergus hadn’t played with her before. We had a quick run-through. It was very much of the moment.”

The bottom line for Manning was that this debut CD was an accurate reflection of what he does in a gig. “All I wanted was honesty. I didn’t want multi-tracking or mixing, and I wanted a maximum of two or three takes. Some of the songs were new to us; some we’ve done before. There is no theme to the album but the songs are connected in a way because there are themes of home, identity and love. I was thinking about how there is pressure to release ALL new music that’s innovative and new, but I didn’t want to write ten new tunes – I wanted to do what I’d do on a gig.

“At the end of the day, it’s an honest snapshot of who I am. And I just love great songs.”

*When the Sun Comes Out is available now; Luca Manning – Chet Baker: Chet is at The Blue Arrow, Glasgow on Thursday October 24; www.thebluearrow.co.uk

Text (c) Alison Kerr, 2019; album cover artwork by Irenie Blaze-Cameron; portrait by Delilah Niel

Liane Carroll: A Sentimental Journey

If there is one ticket that represents exceptional value for money at the Glasgow Jazz Festival then it is surely the one-man show by Liane Carroll on the festival’s opening night, on Wednesday.

Singer-pianist Carroll doesn’t just play and sing; she takes the audience on an emotional journey which might start, end and be punctuated with rib-tickling jokes but includes detours via various levels of gut-wrenching, heart-rending ballads, swinging standards and raucous blues.

Wherever she goes during her show, Carroll takes enraptured listeners with her; there’s no “her and us” about it – it’s very much a shared experience, and one which leaves no emotional stone un-turned. It’s no wonder everyone from Gerry Rafferty, with whom she toured and recorded, to Joe Stilgoe, who penned the title track of her forthcoming album Seaside, has wanted her to sing their songs.

For Carroll, it’s essential to have the audience on the journey with her. “Singing is communicating,” she says, “so I don’t feel I’m up there on my own. I have the audience with me, and we have a laugh together.” That community feeling undoubtedly stems from the 51-year-old’s first musical experiences, when she was encouraged to sing and play in her grandparents’ home in Hastings, where, from the age of six, she lived with her mother. “It was a daft household but very musical,” she recalls, with a giggle.

Carroll’s parents were semi professional singers. “They sang at the Country Club in Eastbourne – that’s how they met. Me mum had sung for a while in the 1950s with the Ken Mackintosh Band. Me nan played the piano, and I took to it early. I was taught by a concert pianist who lived locally. She was a bit of a dragon – she would threaten to snip my hair if I made any mistakes. I really thought she might do it, and one time I wore my hair in a beret so it was out of sight. Me mum said: ‘What are you doing?’ and I explained – and she had a word with her.”

Having heard and liked jazz being played and sung at home, Carroll got hooked on it in her early teens, and her listening tastes changed from the Osmonds (“I was in love with Donnie”) and the Bay City Rollers to big band music, with which she became obsessed. “I saw the BBC Radio Big Band doing a tribute to the bandleader Ted Heath, and then got into Count Basie, Stan Kenton and Maynard Ferguson… Me mum and nan used to take me to different gigs and then when I was about 16 I started to go by myself. I’d go up to London on the train and stay with a couple of relatives and come back down. It was lovely. It didn’t happen very regularly but it was my treat.”

By this time, Carroll had begun to teach herself how to play jazz. “Towards the end of my grade exams, I really enjoyed playing jazz but it wasn’t really encouraged in those days. It was [she assumes a snooty voice]: ‘Oh well, if you like that kind of thing…’. Which of course just made me do it even more, and practise doing it even more.”

What did her schoolmates think of this obsession – or was playing and listening to jazz a closet activity? “On the whole, I think it was pretty much accepted,” says Carroll. “A few people thought I was a bit weird not wanting to go to discos, but I didn’t have much confidence about going to discos and I did prefer jazz. I wasn’t that sociable; I wasn’t one of the alpha girls, the popular girls. As I got older, I made lots of friends and they used to enjoy me playing a bit of jazz on the piano at the school assembly – the school liked to have someone playing as people were coming into the hall, and I liked the chance to show off! I wasn’t bullied about it or anything, and I wasn’t shy – I’ve never been shy! I just wasn’t in that set of girls who were popular.”

The singing quickly followed; indeed it was her eventual second husband, bass player Roger Carey, who first got her up to sing on gigs. Asked who her favourite singer was when she was growing up, and Carroll responds immediately: “Vic Damone. He was amazing, a lovely singer. He had it all – the voice, the rhythm and the phrasing – and he did lots with the Count Basie Orchestra. Of the female jazz singers, Sarah Vaughan was my favourite though of course I enjoyed Ella Fitzgerald as well. But I’ve always had diverse tastes: growing up, I used to listen to Laura Nyro – she had a big impact on me when I was about 14 – and I’ve been doing her songs ever since. My husband introduced me to Todd Rundgren’s music, and I really love him too…”

It was only after a very short marriage, from her late teens into her early twenties – “not a pleasant time” – that Carroll really got stuck into performing. “I had been living in York during that period and came back down to Hastings with my one-year-old daughter, and got a residency playing piano at the Grand Hotel in Eastbourne.”

Since then, she has worked in all sorts of bands – both in terms of musical genre and size – and notched up numerous awards, among them two prestigious BBC Jazz Awards in the same year (2005). Although she is constantly adding new strings to her bow, and gaining ever more acclaim, Carroll still has the weekly residency at her local wine bar, Porters, that she has been doing – “when I’m around” – for 26 years, and leads her trio, which features her husband on bass.

Does working with your husband only work because you both have other projects? “I think so! It really does,” laughs Carroll. “We did work together all the time at one point and that got a bit much. We’ve been together 28 and a half years, and we’re just getting there now. It’s always been a work in progress; it’s lovely now.”

In the last decade or so, Carroll has become a regular visitor to Scotland – more in her capacity as a guest teacher than as a star turn, in the popular vocal jazz workshops organised by her friend, the Pathhead-based singer-songwriter Sophie Bancroft.

But this week, it will just be the audience at Wild Cabaret that Carroll has for company. “It’s a nice change to do a solo gig, it’s more spontaneous. Sometimes I chat too much between numbers – it used to be out of nervousness but now it’s just who I am. I know I talk too much, and I know it’s bollocks – but it’s happy bollocks, and it’s true!”

* Liane Carroll performs at Wild Cabaret on Wednesday; details from www.jazzfest.co.uk. Her next Scottish workshop with Sophie Bancroft is the Cromarty Vocal Jazz Workshop, April 1-3 2016. For info, email sbancroft@btinternet.com. Her new album Seaside is out in September.

First published in Scotland on Sunday, June 21

CD Recommendations: February 2014

Oscar Peterson & Ben Webster: During This Time (Art of Groove)

Not only is this previously unreleased live quartet performance from 1972 available here in CD form, but the two-disc pack also includes a 64-minute DVD of the film footage of the concert so fans can enjoy a wonderful opportunity to watch two giants of jazz in all their seventies splendour (Peterson’s a vision in pink checked suit and Crayola Violet Red tie). The camera gets so close, in fact, that it’s possible to study the legendary tenor saxophonist Webster’s embarrassed facial expressions as his masterful solo on I Got It Bad And That Ain’t Good is applauded, and to count the beads of sweat on the Peterson brow. Among the non-stop musical highlights are the funky Poutin’, a rollicking Cotton Tail and particularly gorgeous versions of such ballads as Duke Ellington’s sublime Come Sunday.

Various Artists: Unissued on 78s – Jazz & Hot Music 1927-1931 (Challenge Records/Retrieval Records)

As Chris Ellis’s liner notes make clear, the 24 tracks on this wonderful compilation may have appeared on LPs and CDs, but none were ever issued on 78s – and several have never previously been heard at all. If you want a flavour of the kind of hot jazz that the cool college kids were dancing to in the last few years of Prohibition, this CD is ideal. Featuring music by some of best white bands of the day, it boasts Benny Goodman, Bix Beiderbecke, the Dorseys, Hoagy Carmichael, Joe Venuti  and Miff Mole in its impressive line-up, as well as a raft of excellent but lesser-remembered musicians. Bix fans will delight in the rarely available Deep Down South plus Just Imagine, a track which fires debate about whether it’s Bix or a disciple playing. There’s even pleasure to be had in the Wodehouse-worthy names of such musicians as Snooks Friedman, Nappy Lamare and Fud Livingston.

Rene Marie: I Wanna Be Evil – With Love to Eartha Kitt (Motema)

She may have sworn never to record a tribute album, but the American vocalist Rene Marie has produced a winner with this homage to Eartha Kitt, whose spell – as she eloquently explains in her fascinating liner notes – she first, unwittingly, fell under when Kitt played Catwoman in the Batwoman TV series and Rene was a black-female-role-model hungry ten-year-old. The homage only extends to the choice of songs and the spirit of sexual abandon that Rene Marie conjures up; her breathy, lush voice – thankfully, for those of us who find a little of Kitt goes a long way – is nothing like the original, and the arrangements are re-imaginings of the familiar Kitt versions. Her accompanying sextet features an impressive contribution from Adrian Cunningham on clarinet.

Scott Hamilton: Swedish Ballads and More (Stunt) 

The great American tenor sax star is now an elder statesman of the jazz scene and he seems to be recording more prolifically than ever. This new CD finds him in the company of a Scandinavian trio and playing mostly songs with a Swedish connection. As ever, it’s a joy to hear his big, authoritative tone, lyrical style and the easygoing bounce which gives way to some barnstorming swinging on the uptempo Swing in F. Hamilton is a master balladeer and this album’s stand-out is You Can’t Be In Love With a Fool, a pretty ballad penned in 1953 by a Swedish songwriter named Ulf Sandstrom, which is also notable for Jan Lundgren’s elegant pianistics.

Dominic Alldis Trio: A Childhood Suite (Canzona Music)

Four years ago, the English pianist, composer and arranger Alldis released Songs We Heard, a collection of piano trio improvisations on nursery rhyme themes. With A Childhood Suite he revisits 14 of these tunes, in the company of a string orchestra – and the results are lovely, with the strings adding a richness and cinematic quality to the proceedings, while contrasting with the lightness of Alldis’s piano touch. There are some memorable moments of witty interplay between piano and strings, notably on London Bridge and I Saw Three Ships, and a funky arrangement of Three Blind Mice that’s so catchy it could change the way you sing that tune ..

Liane Carroll: Ballads (Quiet Money)

The unimaginative title of British singer-pianist Liane Carroll’s new album belies the unexpected choices of songs included. Against a backdrop of strings arrangements (particularly effective on the Sinatra classic Only the Lonely) or accompanied by guitar – as she is on such gorgeously simple and affecting tracks as the opener Here’s to Life and the slowed-down Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow – Carroll sets out her stall as a passionate, gutsy interpreter of songs, with a larger-than-life musical presence and soul-oriented vocal style.

Liane Carroll @ The Weir

Well, I may have been the DD (not – surprisingly, given how often she has crept up in jazz conversations recently – Doris Day, but the designated driver), but that didn’t stop me from having a great night at a new out-of-town venue for jazz in the west of Scotland.

The Weir, in Bridge of Weir outside Glasgow, looks like your average Scottish main street pub from the outside, but inside, the bistro part of the property looks like the sort of nightclub Doris, Rock and co frequented in those classic 1950s movies: all grey drapes, low lights and chic furnishings. But then, it is (once a month anyway) a jazz supper club..

My friend Jill and I made the journey out of town partly to check out this new venue, and support its laudible aim of bringing national as well as local jazz names to perform for a small audience (whose four-course dinner and a cocktail are included in the £25 ticket price), and largely because the star du jour was Liane Carroll, the ebullient English singer-pianist who had travelled up from the south coast to launch this new series.

And she certainly launched it in memorable style, serving up two sets that were characterised by her energy, passion and self-deprecating humour. To have had her perform as anything other than a solo act would have been considerably less effective  – though the nook in which her mini upright piano was positioned did bear an unfortunate resemblance to a crematorium (curtains behind her, stained glass on two sides, big stands of funereal flowers) ..  The presence of a couple of other musicians might have been better visually than the sight of Carroll looking like the organist at the crem, but it would surely have detracted a little from her performance and its spontaneity and intensity.

Any local who hadn’t known there was a soulful singer in town would have known it within seconds of Carroll casting off on a raucous, bluesy take on Cole Porter’s Love For Sale. And the football showing in the pub through the wall didn’t stand a chance against her dynamic and hard-swinging Let There Be Love.

Carroll may have pinched some of the great Julie London’s repertoire with No Moon At All and the lovely Gordon Jenkins’s ballad Goodbye but there is absolutely no similarity between the hushed, breathy, intimate London vocals and Carroll’s gutsy, no-holds-barred, no emotional stone unturned style of singing. Her Mad About the Boy had my companion in tears, while her interpretations of Tom Waits’s Take Me Home and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s If I Loved You threatened to have the same effect on me.

The evening ended with a good old singalong on a number that is impossible to take seriously since Rupert Everett’s now-iconic version in My Best Friend’s Wedding: I Say a Little Prayer for You. Coached by Carroll in our “X Factor gestures”, we were sent out into the night – and the drive home – on a high..

* The next jazz supper features The Marco Cafolla Trio with Stewart Forbes on October 30. For tickets, call 01505 228003 or email theweirsupperclub@musician.org

Here’s a video shot at Sunday’s concert – the lighting wasn’t very conducive to filming!