Jamie Cullum: Listening to jazz for first time is like seeing a Rembrandt

Jamie Cullum has come a long way from Heard it All Before in 1999 to Interlude 15 years later. Riding on a jazz baseline, the English singer-songwriter pursued a crossover style that mixes jazz with melodic pop and rock in the intervening years. He calls it “a total approach to music and an amazing springboard to go to all these other places”.

Cullum, the best-selling jazz artiste ever to come out of the United Kingdom, is set for a one-night performance at the St Regis on May 13. The 36-year-old is known for his spontaneous covers and lively performances but his versatility in morphing from one genre to another is a signature that will stand out.

There are some old-time greats in Cullum’s repertoire like legends Frank Sinatra and Tom Waits, but the biggest influences are some of the most respected pianists, especially Elton John and Billy Joel.

It is intriguing because Callum did not grow up with jazz. Instead, like most kids, heavy metal was his music of choice before he discovered hip hop, where eventually found that what he was listening had their roots in jazz.

“When I did start listening to jazz it seemed like a code I wanted to crack, but I was just a kid who collected records so I didn't start immediately trying to play it,” he says in a recent interview in Macau.

“It's a bit like seeing a Rembrandt for the first time and thinking, ‘I'm going to be a painter’. It took me a while to sit at the piano, but I knew I had a good ear for music because no one taught me to play — I could just hear things and work them out.”

Jazz purists would dismiss Cullum as one of their own because his crossover work.  But what would a giant like trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who thinks jazz reached its plateau in the 1960s and should not evolve beyond that era, think of Cullum’s musical experiments.

He came face to face with Marsalis five years ago and says: ““I met him, and I was a little nervous about it actually, but he could not have been nicer, more effusive — and also he knew everything about my career. He was really complimentary, and he saw exactly how I was trying to join the dots between the things that I loved, and put a British perspective on it.”