Destined to be forever tainted and taunted as the jazz hobbit who got lucky with Sophie Dahl, the showman that is Jamie Cullum has always been more appealing in practice than theory.
As his sixth album, Momentum, looms, Cullum has expanded his horizons, shedding his jazz-lite straitjacket in favour of a fuller, more percussive approach, similar to the turning Norah Jones took with The Fall in 2009. On this bubbly appetiser for a year of tough touring, it worked a treat on The Same Things and Sad, Sad World, further enhanced by Laura Mvula’s deft cameo.
Although he did the standing-on-the-piano trick, there were none of his trademark sortees into the crowd. There was, though, his customary elfin mateyness (“whoo, I’ve had two children since we last met”), but glimpses of a more acerbic wit than popular folklore suggests (“sing along if you don’t know the words: just make some shit up, that’s what I’m doing”).
Beyond the charm Cullum added layers of brooding ambiguity to Cole Porter’s Love For Sale, glided through Rihanna’s Don’t Stop The Music with the assurance of Smokey Robinson, and gave his own, finger-pointing Get Your Way a sinister, hardboiled respray.
The sailing wasn’t wholly plain. A sloppy cover of Radiohead’s High And Dry smacked of contrivance and occasional retreats into supperclub noodling seemed to bore Cullum as much as the crowd.
However, such creative restlessness augers well for the future: there is much more to come from Jamie Cullum.
