I confess. I once owned a 7” single by Dean Martin: a slurred version of the bluegrass musician John Hartford’s song, ‘Gentle On My Mind’. The song won a number of Grammy awards, which justifies my purchase with the benefit of hindsight, but I sold all evidence of it at the time when I became a serious fan of prog-rock in my youth. In those days, it wasn’t even cool to own a 7” single, let alone one sung by a member of the Brat Pack.
What, you might ask, has all this got to do with Madeleine Peyroux? Well, she banishes all traces of any residual embarrassment by transforming the song into something lush and beautiful on her album, The Blue Room. Despite the presence of musicians of the calibre of Larry Goldings on organ and Dean Parks on electric guitar, for a Madeleine Peyroux release, it’s just a little too awash with strings for my taste and you could argue that it’s more quality pop (even veering into country territory at times) than it is jazz. But that would be to deny her legitimate jazz singer’s ability to transform material by the likes of Buddy Holly, Randy Newman, Leonard Cohen and Warren Zevon – in a similar way to Cassandra Wilson – into something that takes on a new dimension – and to do it with a voice that reminds many punters of Billie Holiday.
So that’s by way of prefacing this wonderful example of a genuine jazz singer’s art: a live version of another Leonard Cohen, ‘Dance Me To The End Of Love’, the first number on her breakout second album, Careless Love, and arguably the definitive interpretation of a Cohen song. In fact, there are two versions and it’s very hard to draw a line between the two. There’s her performance from 16 years ago, which is slightly shorter – and therefore suggestive that the instrumental introduction heard on the version I chose finally has been elided. The band play impeccably on both versions, with an electric organ and violin added on this more recent live-in-LA rendition, while the accordion from the older one has been dispensed with. But it’s her voice itself that finally clinched it. On the older version, she sounds ever so slightly more mannered, and one or two commentators even complained that she strayed off tune on occasions. In fact, the singer had to have a cyst surgically removed from her vocal chords back in 2004 and she revealed that it took so long to re-train her voice that she even considered giving up singing. So we should lend her a little compassion and understanding. Even so, I feel that on the later rendition the ‘distinctive, honeyed croon’ (as it’s described on her website) and the Billie-esque timbre are slightly more evident. Listen to both and see what you think…
When I first came across young Ms. Peyroux, I thought for some reason best known to myself that her fluency in French suggested she must be a French Canadian. Not a bit of it. She is as American as pumpkin pie, born it seems in the hip university city of Athens, Georgia, which spawned the B52s and R.E.M. among others. She was brought up in New York and California, then moved to Paris with her mother as a 12-year-old. That by now familiar cover of Careless Love, showing her as a barefoot street urchin, became synonymous in my mind with her time spent busking on the streets of Paris, playing apparently with street musicians in the Latin Quarter. Having done her time and learnt her trade, she was discovered by Atlantic Records, who released her debut album, Dreamland.
She recorded the best-selling follow-up on Rounder Records with Joni Mitchell’s ex, Larry Klein, in the production seat. And if all that failed to add up to someone seriously hip, she worked subsequently with the likes of Walter Becker, k.d. lang, Marc Ribot, Allen Toussaint and Meshell Ndegeocello. Enough to make you spit were it not for the fact that Madeleine Peyroux seems to be a seriously decent and thoughtful human being, who acknowledges Louis Armstrong and Nina Simone among her teachers and heroes, who cites the dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson as a ‘spoken-word genius’ and who suggests that ‘African American music has been the one constant, true path in [her] life.’ Her recent, ninth album, Let’s Walk – featuring more of her original songs this time than covers – was selected as one of the albums of the year by Konstantin Rega on All About Jazz.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I rest my case: Madeleine Peyroux is a serious and seriously good jazz singer.
