This, being my first album, was a big break-through for me! For years, my horizon had been to have a record deal and – even though Black Box was a relatively small, jazz, classical and esoteric music label I did feel immensely proud to have my music recognised by people supposedly “in the know”! We artistes are fragile little flowers with a huge need for regular ego massage and business people don’t often give you money unless they think you’re going to make it back for them, somehow; that was flattering.

I’d been singing, playing the piano and writing songs since I was about five years old but by 1999, something had stopped me really believing that my music was going to be recorded. I’d sent countless demos off to management and record companies and done loads of gigs in places like the Mean Fiddler, Dublin Castle and the Garage. But, maybe because I felt it wasn’t a responsible way to live my life, it wasn’t a living, it wasn’t going to put a roof over anyone’s head – I felt safer when I had the masterstroke of working on cruise-ships. Shearing then dragging my long-haired, new heavy metal drummer husband along with me. I thought, we haven’t been offered any world tours, so lets make our own. It felt right, and it was a fantastic experience but I now know I didn’t do it for me, or us. I did it to satisfy my Dad’s need for financial security and stability, something that had been ingrained into him for very good reason by his mother who had grown up in the workhouse and orphanages. I don’t regret it to this day. What a fantastic learning curve – but I’m glad I’ve worked out why I lost faith in my music for so many years – I had bigger fish to fry!

And we were eating plenty of those fish and enjoying a land-lubbers version of the cruise-ship life in sunny Cyprus in 1999 when a customer at the hotel bar we’d been adorning for the past six months asked me why I didn’t have a record deal. It sounds really ungrateful but so many people had asked me that question over the years that I’d got a bit fed up with it and by then my stock answer was “I don’t know but unless one of us runs a record label, there’s nothing much we can do about it so let’s enjoy ourselves!” to which the customer’s reply was “I don’t but my friend Lord Chadlington is on the board of one – I’m going to call him and I’ll put up the money you need to make an album”. That incredible offer came from city head-hunter Philippa Rose to whom I’ll be eternally grateful!

Record Deal!

Sure enough, two months later, on my return from Cyprus I had a call from Lord Chadlington’s office (I thought it was a joke at first!) and a few weeks later I was in the studio with Nick and the band. One day into mixing, Chris Craker, “Mr Black Box” came in, listened to a track and offered to sign me up! The end of the rainbow! Considering “having a record deal” had been my goal for so long, I was incredibly ignorant about what it entailed; and how one record deal can differ from another! I assumed that I’d have all sorts of people running around “looking after” me! Stylists, PR people, radio pluggers, promoters. Of course, being an independent label there was a handful of staff all doing most of those roles not just for me, but for the other twenty-or-so artists on the label! A bit of a come-down! Still, with the help of the label and thanks to the generosity of Philippa Rose, we managed to launch A Little Bird Told Me at Ronnie Scott’s Club in June 2000 – another life-long ambition fulfilled!

I remember being in the car going home very late that night, saying to Charlie “I’ve seen my name outside Ronnie’s and a long queue waiting to go in, I’ve shared a bill with Jim Mullen, I’ve sold 45 CDs, I’ve sat and sung at the piano at Ronnie Scott’s, I’ve sung “Father’s Day” to my father and seen him sitting there crying – I don’t need to do anything else for the rest of my life… my work here is done! The next day my Dad called… “Hi, what a great night, and a free bar! You must tell me how your set went because I can’t remember a thing!” Thank goodness for the free-bar – I didn’t sit back on my laurels. I took Black Box up on their offer to let me use a desk at the office and help promote my album. I pretended to be “Clare Smith; Joanna Eden’s A&R person” and used their headed paper, fax and phone until they politely asked me to stop! But the album – for a debut jazz album – received great press and has sold really well – it’s still in print which is an achievement in itself after six years!

I suppose Father’s Day will always be my favourite song because it seemed to capture my relationship with my Day, although certain lines are no longer true (post child!) eg. “I sing to the moon, I get up around noon”, the singing to the moon bit’s right but long gone are the lie-ins!! I’m really proud of my arrangement of Night and Day withwhich I took great liberties and I hope Cole Porter, wherever he is, isn’t too offended! For sheer fun, watching a simple song take on a great life of it’s own, I love Here Comes Baby which explodes into a salsa extravaganza at the end courtesy of the wonderful trumpet skills of Alan Leggett, a great friend who we met during our Cunard Cruise-ship days; one of the world’s greatest cynics who’s favourite word was “bollocks” but who changed into an awestruck child whenever he spoke of his love of Latin music – Brazilian especially. I’m so proud that we’ve captured him at his best on this album – he sent me a home-made Brazilian music compilation tape once called “A Selection from heaven” – Hope heaven’s a bossanova Alan - if it is, I know you’re playing your heart out up there!

We recorded A Little Bird told me at Porcupine Studios where I’d previously recorded a demo and fallen in love with a) Nick Taylor, owner and recording engineer par excellence b) the piano, a lovely old Steinway treasured by Nick because it belonged to his father, pianist …. Taylor and c) the lovely family atmosphere created by the fact that this was Nick’s family home, with his mum bringing in sandwiches and offering endless hospitality. This sounds very Californian, but there was a lot of love in that studio and it immediately put me at ease. I’ve never told Nick but I wrote a song about him the day I bought home the finished mixes of the album called “Smile On” cos he has the most wonderful, gentle and heartfelt smile.

Joanna's Thoughts on each track

I Don’t Smoke
It sounds very cynical to say this, but I kind of wrote this song to order. I’d been writing songs for years but – when Philippa Rose introduced my voice to Black Box and told me they might like to sign me up – I assumed that it would be a jazz album, and my songs weren’t jazz, I didn’t know what they were but I knew I’d have to come up with some jazz songs if I wanted to have any of my own writing on the album.

So I Don’t Smoke is a kind of corrupted blues with the wrong chords and the wrong number of bars! I was listening to Diana Krall’s album “When I Look in Your Eyes” quite a lot during the summer of 1999 and I loved the humour of “Popsickle Toes”. I knew swing and humour, swing and sexy all worked well together and I think I managed to capture that mix in I Don’t Smoke. When it comes to funny and sexy I had great inspiration from Charlie of course…. And he can swing with the best of them!! (“I swing like a well-hung mule” Charlie)!

Here Comes Baby and Triste
Thanks to Alan (see album introduction) and an ex-boyfriend who gave me a Astrid Gilberto tape one Christmas I’ve had a long running affair with latin music which I’ve no intention of breaking off! I’d love to record an album in Spanish or Portuguese one day. I speak neither language but love singing in them. There’s something very liberating about being released from literal meaning. Sounds seem to have their own meanings and you can really get into the music within the language in its abstract form. (I loved the way that ??? from the Cocteau Twins used her own made up language just for vocalised sound’s sake) Anyway I digress because this song is in English! It’s written about Dan Boutwood – our fantastic guitarist, one of Charlie’s oldest friends who – over time I believe has allowed me to become an honorary member of their brotherhood (“The Scrotal Jesters”!) Luckily, Dan’s been very understanding about me using his romantic life as the narrative for this song. I hope I do it with great affection aswell as humour. Alison Neale provided the most beautiful flute solo on this one, on the first take despite having a head cold and the reddest nose I’d seen in ages! Dan doesn’t feature on this track because his wife Svetlana was 9 months pregnant at the time of recording but guitar is provided by Italian Francesco Cavalieri another cruise-ship friend and bossa-lover! I’m so proud of my brass lines at the end and listening to them come to life (no it isn’t a band it’s one supreme trumpeter over and over again!). Hearing Alan bring those lines to life as I sat in the booth with Nick is one of the highlights of my career so far I think! For Triste I took my inspiration from Ella Fitzgerald’s classic version of Desafinado. It had a delightful flute counter-melody, which then becomes two harmonising flutes. Nick had the idea of using a Djembe which - for me - gives the percussion a wonderfully rooted feeling.

Don’t Explain
Only Billie Holliday could come up with these lyrics; so desolate, without hope; resigned! I think we did the vocal very late after a long, arduous day in the studio. It shows… but I think it works! I love tenor sax player Luke Annesley’s solo on this one. He looked blankly at me when I tried to explain what I was going for – then nailed it in the first take! The lesson is….. don’t explain!

59th Street Bridge Song
I’d been gigging this one for years and – since going to see the fabulous Tanya Maria a few years before at Ronnie’s had been attempting her speciality – vocal harmonising with piano improvisation. What a great idea to use a harmonised vocal as a starting point… and no-one does two-part harmony better than Simon & Garfunkel in my opinion. This song is such good fun and it’s humour and laziness seem to just fit with a swing feel.

Father’s Day
This is a very special song to me. I think if you live in London, as a struggling artist for long enough you’ll come across a book called The Artists Way. I’d never been one for self-help books and I haven’t read one since but this one seemed to explain my condition to me…. Always on the verge of doing some recording, some writing, some rehearsing… but never quite starting! Feeling very frustrated with myself because I couldn’t explain why I wasn’t actively doing the one thing I really wanted to do. One of the chapters in the book refers you back to your relationship with your parents (as any psychological book will eventually do I suppose!) and I realised that (not surprisingly) so much of my desire to be a musician came from my musician Dad but (this is the surprising bit) also many of the fears and guilt. So I suddenly had someone to blame for my inactivity…. Enjoyed a whole day of passing the buck, then realised quite rightly that the buck stops here and I needed to get over it. At the same time, I just happened to be going through that late twenties phase when you start to value your parents as adults, realise they’re mortal and start (sorry but it’s true) to shit yourself at the prospect of life without them! Writing this song was a great way of getting through these feelings (how Californian of me!) and, at the same time, I managed to avoid that embarrassing conversation with my Dad who would have been more than slightly confused if I’d tried to explain my psychological journey to him; and utterly mortified if I’d done what I really wanted to do; cuddle him and say “I love you”.

Sea Journey
Apart from the mixed blessing of seeing loads of the world in one go, the best thing about working on cruise ships is meeting musicians from all over the world. The first thing that strikes you about American musicians is how well schooled they are compared to us Brits. They’ve got a very straightforward, skills-based attitude to learning they’re instruments which starts very early in schools and follows through into great vocational college courses. The American musicians were highly skilled, smart business people whereas we Brits had great feel for the music, could whip up the crowd (and they were of an age which took a bit of whipping!) but looked scruffy and rebellious and couldn’t sight-read for toffee! With the right attitude we could certainly learn a lot from the Americans and I think that feeling was mutual – they seemed to get off on our attitude (we educated them with Derek & Clive and Spinal Tap!) and we were certainly in awe of their technical proficiency. And we got on so well with one of these foreign johnnies that we just had to bring him home! His name was Scott Noftle and he hailed from Toronto. He was the fastest reading bass-player in the West. I renamed him our little Scottie Dog and persuaded him to join us in Cyprus for a hotel gig. On a quiet evening in the Helios Bar (and off-season there were many!), we would trawl through the jazz musicians’ bible The Real Book looking for new tunes to test our improving reading skills. We came across Chick Corea’s Sea Journey and I immediately fell in love with its wide open harmony, modern sounding melody and moments of rhythmic excitement. Don’t know what Chick thinks of my arrangement – and haven’t dared ask him yet!

Lover Man and God Bless the Child
I remember meeting a jazz-lover in the Three Greyhounds in soho once. He had asked Charlie who he thought was the finest jazz drummer the UK had ever produced. Lucky for Charlie he said Phil Seamen at which the man smiled, reached into an ageing carrier bag and pulled out an album of the very same drummer (I can only assume he carried it everywhere!). The entire cover was a picture of a terribly ill looking man wearing a tattered old jumper with what looked a lot like vomit stains down the front. One of these days I want to write an essay about the unbreakable link between music (or at least music journalism) and mortality; with no disrespect to Phil Seamen, I wonder which marketing person had the stroke of genius to plaster this degrading photo on his life’s work. A bit like the record company who delighted in releasing a Charlie Parker album – against his wishes – from a session at which he’d been unable to stand up; indeed someone had to hold him up to play his instrument. The rumours surrounding his condition at the session were enough to stimulate interest in the recording and it sold well. Billie Holliday’s life is a jazz marketer’s wet dream. People like her and Bird lived the lives most of us desire and fear in equal part. My theory (I seem to be writing my essay already!) is that it’s the same basic instinct which forces us to slow down when we see a road accident in the opposite carriageway. It’s real mortality in black and white, red and brown; blood and guts. And put it together with the most evocative music you can imagine, we humans are like moths to the flame. Comedian Bill Hicks once said “I want my rockstars dead!” Anyway, that same old man in the pub in soho then asked me…. “So you’re a singer… are you for Ella or Billie?” Like it was a prize fight! The surprising thing is that the one that moves me most didn’t kill herself – apart from the odd snack too far! Ella looks to me like a lovely cuddly aunty. And her voice is velvet or champagne, never bourbon. Like Paul McCartney, she didn’t have the courtesy to die young, have a public breakdown, wind people up, or leave a trail of broken hearts. She just loved her music and her audiences. If you look at it like a prize fight, she’ll always lose, as Macca does to Lennon! But life’s so much more than a car crash, you can tell from they’re music they love life, they’re music celebrates it! The poor, troubled genii were playing with fire – so that we didn’t have to. They both done good. Here endeth the lesson!

How Deep
Very difficult to write a song about me mum. There’s an awful lot of stuff going on. I’ve written another one since then. I think it’ll take a few! This was written when I was fascinated with motherhood, because I wanted it for myself. And I’d been at that age when suddenly I appreciated having a mother; an inspirational mother – up until then it was just a given fact. I suppose in the song I’m just asking – was I worth all that pain and grief?! Knowing that the answer would be yes because I’ve grown up with that as a given fact. If I hadn’t I probably would never have asked. So it was a bit like walking into a room, knowing you look fabulous but asking people anyway! Very narcissistic but – hey! I’m a singer; what do you expect?! So glad Julie Walkington played bass on this. Only she would tolerate my crazy whim to do a slow ballad in five, four time – knowing that the singer-pianist was unable to count it! Thanks for holding it together Julie!

A Little Bird Told Me
This is me experimenting.. (and I mean experimenting!) with modern jazz harmony. It gives a wonderfully blank canvas for lyrics and I’d like to do more. Lyrically, I suppose I’m exploring the concept laid down by that great philosopher…. Sting; “if you love somebody, set them free!” I don’t quite manage it though because I end repeating “I’m never gonna let him go”!

Night and Day
Hope Cole Porter forgives me for this arrangement which takes multiple liberties. I think it goes someway to prove that a classic song works … anytime, anyplace anywhere! This is the one track Dan was able to play on (for family reasons) and I think he did a great job!

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