Cullum mixes big-band sass with pop rhythms in enjoyably risky show
Has Jamie Cullum made a pact with the powers of darkness? The diminutive singer/ songwriter/pianist just seems to get younger and younger. Since his last Prom, he’s released another album, performed at the White House, and become a father to two children, an event that normally brings on a certain reflectiveness.
Yet here he was, still the hyperactive imp with a huge backing band and choir, running from the Albert Hall platform to the organ loft and back again, scampering over to the piano to hammer out a scrunchy blues progression. His mental and physical focus is amazing. To jump off a piano while singing without missing a beat in a song is quite a feat, even if it’s not a feat that adds much to our musical enjoyment.
As always, the other Jamie Cullum emerged, the sensitive musician who takes endless pains to get things right. He may have kicked hell out of the piano’s sustaining pedal in Dianne Reeves’s Comes Love, but he caressed its keyboard in a new song of his own (“It’s half about my wife [Sophie Dahl],” he said coyly, though it soon became clear it was all about her and nothing else). In a typically generous gesture, Cullum showcased some of the terrific performing talent he’s featured on his Radio 2 show. They included the flamenco-meets-blues sound of the Remi Harris Trio, the folk-tinged voice of Eska, quirky yet somehow magnificent, and the punchy earthiness of Dakhla Brass.
Cullum’s own songs gave a glimpse of his serious side, very effectively in
The Same Things, which raged against the unfathomability of the world, less so in Life is Grey, which switched too fast from desolation to warm consolation. The heart of the show was in the classic songs he’s reworked as part of his Song Society project, performed here with the aid of the Roundhouse Choir (woefully underamplified, alas) and Jules Buckley’s wonderful Heritage Orchestra.
Everything took on an enjoyably risky, seat-of-the-pants quality, with big-band sassiness and pop rhythms mingled in a way which ought not to work but somehow did. Reeves’s
Comes Love became a riotous play of colours, with the brass players rising up one by one to strut their stuff.
In a clever arrangement of Canadian singer The Weeknd’s Can’t Feel My
Face, Cullum got the audience to provide the harmonies, and the last number, God Only Knows, was an ecstatic singalong that morphed into a standing ovation.