By MIKAEL WOOD
Jamie Cullum doesn't want anybody to get the wrong idea about his new album, "Interlude."
A British singer and piano player who emerged in the early 2000s as a precocious, messy-haired jazz star, Cullum spent the next decade inching ever closer to pop. He wrote original songs and covered "Don't Stop the Music" by Rihanna, and his previous record, 2013's beat-heavy "Momentum," was produced by Dan the Automator, known for his work with Gorillaz.So it's easy to view "Interlude," a handsome, mostly acoustic collection of standards like "Good Morning Heartache" and "Make Someone Happy," as a kind of retrenchment.
Not so fast.
"I actually worried about putting this one out, because I didn't want to give the impression that I'd got fed up with my process or I felt like it wasn't working," Cullum, 35, said recently. "But there was something I was hungering for that I didn't get from 'Momentum.' That's the jazz musician in me that I'll never escape."
Cullum isn't the only one finding nourishment in an old model. Next month, José James, another young singer with one foot in jazz and another outside it, will release "Yesterday I Had the Blues," a gorgeously stripped-down set of tunes written by or closely associated with the late Billie Holiday.
Timed to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Holiday's birth, "Yesterday I Had the Blues" follows James' 2014 album, "While You Were Sleeping," which dabbled in outsized guitars and dance grooves.
Cullum and James join several other performers tending the jazz-vocal tradition, including Gregory Porter, whose "Liquid Spirit" won a Grammy Award last year, and the similarly acclaimed Cécile McLorin Salvant, who's scheduled to perform Friday night at Walt Disney Concert Hall.
read more: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-ms-standards-notebook-20150213-story.html#page=1
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