Trip down melody lane

AWARD-WINNING and globally renowned jazz pianist Jamie Cullum may be a tour veteran, but he still relishes the uniqueness of Henley Festival.

The musician, 45, who is returning to the festival this summer, says: “I play festivals quite literally all over the world, anywhere you can think of and somehow there’s nothing like Henley Festival.

“There’s nowhere like it with the boats, the dressing up and the pomp and circumstance, the liberal amount of alcohol and party people and the landscape. It’s super fun so I’m looking forward to it.

“I love the cinema there, I went to see the brilliant Hayao Miyazaki film The Boy and The Heron there.

“The kind of thing that we’ll be doing at the festival will be quite a party, the show we do is really energetic. There’s a lot of corners where we don’t always know exactly what we’re going to do, so in that sense it feels really exciting.

“I’ve got the best musicians in the world on stage with me.”

Jamie, who lives in London with his wife, author and food writer Sophie Dahl, and their two daughters, adds: “For people that have been following me for a long time, because my next album doesn’t come out for a little bit, we are playing a lot of songs from the very earliest part of my career as well as some of the later stuff.

“So, if people haven’t seen me for a while, they’ll get an opportunity to hear loads of the stuff that we’ve done over the years.

“It will be a brilliant show and I hope people come down and enjoy it with us.”

The jazz pianist, who also presents the BBC Radio 2 programme The Jazz Show, remains very grounded about how his musical career went stratospheric when he was in his twenties.

“Behind the scenes there was a slow burn and I had loads of people who really helped me, club owners and festival bookers who took a chance on me, smaller radios DJs who really did a lot of the hard graft.

“However, the person with by far the biggest platform who took a chance on me was definitely our dear departed friend Michael Parkinson and he really did change things for the early part of my career.

“I was first on his TV show back in the day when everyone watched the big TV shows, so 15 million people would watch that show.

“The first one I was on was the one with Meg Ryan, where he had a bit of a fight with her. So as it happened, it was hugely watched and then here’s this unknown British jazz kid with a bad haircut and a charity shop suit playing jazz.

“Suddenly I had this amazing platform and it was around that time I was getting signed by Universal Records so it was a real moment.”

The musician is Prussian Jewish on his father’s side and Indian Burmese on his mother’s side and as a result, he says he doesn’t take anything for granted.

“My parents essentially being kind of first-generation in this country, as it were, I think the idea of embracing Britishness was more important than anything else. So it filtered in, that influence, but my Burmese-Indian [family] really came to the UK trying to be as British as possible. My grandfather was an orphan, I think they didn’t get the reception they were imagining, like a lot of people who came here.

“Rather than finding those cultures seeping in, although there were food things that survived and mementos that survived from them having to leave very suddenly and obviously the same with my Jewish granny, I think what has filtered in more is the spirit of gratitude for safety and opportunity to be educated and be able to be involved in art and just those kinds of freedoms.

“They had all that taken away from them and I think that’s probably been more of an influence than anything else. But I’m still figuring out that kind of stuff and it was only really when I started having my own kids that it really became apparent.”

As a musician, Jamie learned to play by ear, having failed his Grade 4 piano exam. “I did some grades really quite young and I think I’ve slightly embellished the story to make it sound better over the years, but probably if I’m really honest, I always had a really good ear for music. I think at that age, I wasn’t hugely disciplined as a kid and I found playing music, the simple things, quite easy. Just by listening to it I could play it.

“So, it seemed a bit annoying to have to learn the mechanics of it but I did it for a while and then at some point other things took over and I gave up. I now love the theory of music and I started to study it during covid for the first time and I’ve been studying ever since.

“It has been just the most wonderful thing and I wish I’d done it earlier, not because I think it would have changed me but because of how much I love it and how much it gives a real texture to my life. It feels very beautiful and authentic and so endless, the possibilities of exploring music and how it relates to everything around us is fascinating.

“My sightreading is still dreadful… I think everyone should have the opportunity to learn music because I think it’s such a joy.”

l Jamie Cullum plays the Floating Stage at Henley Festival on Sunday, July 13 at 8.45pm. For more information, visit www.henley
-festival.co.uk