INTERVIEW: Singer Jacqui Dankworth sets high standards for herself - it could be something to do with the fact that her parents are John Dankworth and Cleo Laine, writes Peter Crawley.
At first, Jacqui Dankworth's story has the dreary familiarity of a celebrity-bashing magazine: another star is in trouble. But, as she tells it, her star is made literal, hanging high in the firmament where it can no longer muster the energy to twinkle. In a desperate attempt to regain his former lustre, the star develops a dependency on batteries and squanders his wife's savings on the expensive habit. Then a message comes through from Him Upstairs: "Emergency mission! Three kings lost in Siberia."
"It's an alternative nativity play," laughs Dankworth as she outlines the plot of her first writing project, a children's stage musical that may yet be adapted for an animated film. The show, which she describes as "very innocent", runs a gamut of musical styles: the twang of country and western, the forlorn rumble of the blues and the fresh beats of hip-hop. And yet you can't ignore the sigh in its title: The Star That Couldn't Shine.
It is early on a Saturday morning and, as she awaits her call to rehearsals, the jazz singer and actress with a wide smile and loose auburn curls is having some trouble finding her own sparkle. Suffering from Kwok's Disease, a reaction to monosodium glutamate that bears all the symptoms of a nasty hangover, Dankworth battles through a headache, rubs her eyes delicately and takes slow, nursing sips from a paper cup of black coffee.
We are talking about how a star can sometimes be overshadowed. Jacqui's parents are Dame Cleo Laine and Sir John Dankworth, the most celebrated partnership in jazz, and while there are obvious bonuses to having jazz in your DNA, such a pedigree has made it hard to forge her own musical identity. A rebellious strike towards a career in investment banking was apparently not an option.
"There's nothing else I'm good at doing, really," she says, "apart from gardening and aromatherapy massages." She recalls Liza Minelli's quandary: "If you're singing great they say, well, what do expect? She's Judy's daughter. And if you're singing bad, they say, well, what do you expect? She's Judy's daughter." Jacqui can seem similarly self-critical.
"Every single album I've made so far, I love elements of, but I've yet to make an album that I just love from the moment the music starts to the moment it finishes. Maybe that never happens. It's like holding on to sand. I'm always looking for perfection." But, as she wearily acknowledges, "You do the best you can at the time." That last sentence wouldn't look out of place as a dictionary definition of jazz. In its truest sense - unpredictable, difficult and unruly - it isn't music for perfectionists.
And yet, until recently, vocalists have had to battle against the prejudices of jazz listeners and even players, as though their trade somehow defiles the rarefied halls of the music with the welcome mat of popular song. "I think the best approach is to do both," Dankworth considers; "to have a real understanding of the harmonic structure and also the words, so the two are married. But having come from such a strong acting background, I find it very hard to sing a song if I don't like the words."
Words are obviously a high priority for Dankworth. She flips open a script for a radio play, Sharon Shrubsal's New Life, which will provide her first acting role in five years. The last line of the play belongs to a West Indian plant, named Simone, who teaches Dankworth's character, the star that couldn't sing, to unleash the diva within: "We run tings," it tells her. "Tings no run we."
In music, Dankworth has managed to exert this kind of control by collaborating with accomplished and sympathetic players. "The musicians I'm closest to seem to be really interested in the words," she says. "Say there's one special word like ..." She trails away in pursuit of it. "Heavenly!" she smiles. "A great accompanist would do something that inspired him about that word. Musicians who take care of the words make them become more magical."
Dankworth has heard music in words since her childhood. Her mother's first solo album, Shakespeare: And All That Jazz, invited the Bard to bop, and on Wordsongs, Jacqui's favourite, her father fitted music to the verses of Auden, Donne and Eliot. "It was really helpful when you were doing O and A-Level English," she recalls; "all these bits of Shakespeare set to music." You can almost picture her at the exam desk, humming the answers.
Let's test her now, shall we? What would an ear attuned to the melody of good writing make of this, the first line of her official biography, which carries all the considered cadence of a foghorn blast: "Some spawn of creative loins spurn a life in the limelight." She clutches her brow. "It's ridiculous, isn't it? It doesn't even make sense." Well, aren't all loins potentially creative? "Then you get this graphic image, don't you?" she hoots, and we picture the loins in question. "It's disgusting!" It's certainly nothin' like a Dame. Worded by the same publicist who labelled bop-idol Jamie Cullum "The David Beckham of Jazz", it's symptomatic of the new, breathless cachet of vocal jazz, dominated by Norah Jones, Katie Melua, Michael Bublé and whoever else has stumbled out of the Sinatra Simulator.
"I wonder how long it's gonna last?" says Dankworth. "A shelf-life of - how long? Ten years? Six years?" It may depend on how long Michael Parkinson can keep broadcasting. "I remember when, if you went on [BBC] Radio 2, that was your career over," Dankworth grins. "Now that's where you've gotta go. Parky's wonderful because he supports so many people; but he's also dangerous, because his taste is quite specific. There are some great singers that he doesn't push and you think, isn't it scary how it's down to one person's particular view of what jazz is?"
She will admit, however, that lately she has scaled down her own song-writing to include the kind of standards that Parky might like. "It's survival, isn't it?" she shrugs. Actually, it's the music industry: She no run tings. Tings run she.
All of this makes it hard not to be a little sceptical about her contribution to Swingin' at the Movies, a theme-tune-heavy recital performed by the RTÉ Concert Orchestra and Big Band during RTÉ's Proms season. It's the kind of fauxbrow populism that the writers of the The Simpsons love to lampoon: Planet of The Apes, The Musical. There may be melismatic opportunities for a jazz singer to find in, say, On The Street Where You Live. But, Jacqui, The Flintstones?
"It's a great tune though," she counters. "I imagine that this show is appealing to the masses, in so far as it's songs that people would like to hear. But it's done very skilfully with great musicians and great arrangements and maybe that's one of the keys. You take something to people that they want to hear but you give them much more."
Is this Dankworth's new approach - the Trojan Horse of jazz? Can you really smuggle a fugitive jazz solo inside the untroubling shape of a yabba dabba do time?
A few days later, as rain pelts down an uninvited percussion on a big top marquee in Farmleigh, conductor Brian Byrne lays all doubts to rest. The show is brilliant. At times Dankworth seems to wobble, prompting me to wonder if she's been at the MSG again, but then she sings When You Wish Upon a Star, and it really shines. There's a better word for it, though, one special word. Heavenly.
Jacqui Dankworth performs in Swingin' at the Movies, part of the RTÉ Proms, at the National Concert Hall on August 13th. Detour Ahead, her new album, is on the Candid label.