Gwyneth Herbert is one of the most talked-about voices on the jazz circuit. As a vocalist she doesn’t just sing other people’s songs, she inhabits them; as a songwriter she turns a love of literature and a passion for classic composition into beautiful, evocative and elegant numbers of her own.

Her rise to fame is as interesting as her music. After writing her first ‘proper’ song when she was 5 (a piece called ‘Bramley Bugs’ Walk’ composed solely on the black notes of the piano which she’ll still plays if pushed – or slightly sloshed!), she took up the infamously taxing French horn and played in a succession of bands and orchestras. However, she also went through a dying-your-hair-pink phase, singing with a hormonal punk band called Wasted Minds! That’s more like it.

Aged 14, with the financial help of a youth music charity, she recorded a five-track demo of her own tunes. “Embarrassing, teen angst-ridden nonsense – I-can’t-get-a-boyfriend stuff,’ she says, refusing to name names although she does let slip that one was called ‘Rewind’ and was about regretting adultery. “I wrote that when I was 12. God knows where that came from.”

This was all back in 1996 and the studio was keen to work with Herbert, perhaps mould her into a solo practitioner of girl power. But Herbert was set on finishing her schooling as she knew she was going to spend the rest of her life singing, whether successfully or not – she could afford to get an education and wait a couple of years.

At sixth-form college in Alton, Hampshire, she began “seriously singing jazz. It was amazingly musically oriented. We had a big-haired avant-garde composer as a music lecturer and he was a real inspiration to me, introduced me to all sorts of great jazz writers.”

As the singer with a college jazz trio, Herbert played pubs and clubs around Hampshire. ‘God Bless The Child’ was the traditional set-opener, ‘Fever’ the final number. “That always went down a storm – but no, I didn’t do moves.  They came later, when I needed to grab people’s attentions in pubs.”

In February 2003, Herbert made her CD, First Songs, with Peter Wallis, co-runner of the famed jazz joint Soho Pizza Express. The jazz press loved it and soon Universal Classics and Jazz, home of Jamie Cullum, came to see what the fuss was about. They liked what they heard and Herbert was duly signed earlier this year.

Bittersweet And Blue was recorded over the summer in west London. The wistful, hypnotic title track is a Herbert/ Will Rutter composition about coming to terms with holiday romance. The up-tempo ‘A Little Less’, with its Jackson 5-ish melody, concerns the importance of keeping hold of your identity, scars, warts and all. ‘Fallen’ imagines that moment “when you’re sitting on a rusty bench in October, it’s raining. Your partner turns round to you and says he’s fallen in love with you… and you realise you don’t feel the same way.”

The choice of cover versions is just as precise. Herbert’s turn at Portishead’s ‘Glory Box’ proves that there’s another vocalist the equal of the stunningly talented Beth Gibbons. There’s a funky, modern take on ‘Fever’. The raspy, wee-hours textures Tom Waits’ early Seventies classic ‘The Heart Of Saturday Night’ is vividly atmospheric, the performance lent wings by Herbert having sung it countless times in noisy south London bars.

So intuitive and soulful are Herbert’s readings of Neil Young’s ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’ and Janis Ian’s ‘At 17’, they sound like they were tailor-made for her.

“‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’ is an amazingly simple song, with a beautiful lyric, says Herbert, “so we’ve done it very close with very neutered guitars, quite fragile and naïve sounding.”

After myriad musical detours in her young life, Gwyneth Herbert has arrived at something special, and something her own. Bittersweet And Blue is the eloquent sound of a young woman keeping things pure, and simple, and true to the love of music that started when she was in the womb.

Gwyneth Herbert and her band open this year’s London Jazz Festival.  After that, they’ll be all over the place so keep your eyes, and ears, peeled!

Find out more at the Gwyneth Herbert microsite.

Bittersweet and Blue, by Gwyneth Herbert
 
Released: 27 September 27 2004
Number of Discs: 1
Label: Ucj
ASIN: B0002U4EIM
Catalogue Number: 9867896

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