8th of March 2006 - SF Gig Review
Memo to radio: British pianist Jamie Cullum's time has come
Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - Joel Selvin, Chronicle Senior Pop Music Critic - San Francisco Chronicle
Jamie Cullum tinkers impatiently at the Steinway while his band arrays itself onstage. He mashes out a few random chords, and then his fingers flicker out a few notes of a funeral march -- this guy hasn't even sung a note or even looked at the audience, and he's already trying out his mordant wit.
Nervous laughter ripples through the front rows. "Don't encourage me," Cullum snaps playfully and launches into the title song of his debut album, "Twentysomething," a tightly swinging finger-snapper that aims those trenchant drolleries at the foibles of the 26-year-old's own generation ("Maybe I'll move back home and pay off my loans") with a groove that would do Mose Allison proud. The audience is instantly supping from the cup of his palm.
Make no mistake -- Cullum is going to be a star, a very big star.
"Never the same show twice," he crowed at the end of his triumphant sold-out show Saturday at the Palace of Fine Arts Theater, after conducting about 80 members of the audience in a makeshift background chorale.
This concert, his fourth Bay Area appearance in two years, sold out in minutes three months ago. He has already been booked for a return appearance June 18 at Oakland's much larger Paramount Theatre. His records can barely be heard on the radio, though.
His 2002 debut may have sold more than 3 million copies around the world, topped the charts in his native England and even sold a solidly respectable 400,000 in the United States. But he is a word-of-mouth phenomenon, and word is only now really starting to spread. By the end of the year, he may have sold millions of records in this country, too.
Radio programmers don't have the imagination of Jamie Cullum, who is bursting with music and whose music busts down barriers. Categories can't contain his talent. He brings certain punk-rock sensibilities to the performance of standards -- in a single move, alienating both the punk-rock fans and the standards crowd -- but that's not the whole of his music, by any means. He is also a burgeoning songwriter with a deft, at times even inspired touch whose best work is clearly ahead of him; think Billy Joel by way of Billie Joe Armstrong.
He is also a persuasive vocal interpreter of his own songs, as well as others that might seem cliched in less able hands. He returned for his encore by himself and played "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?" sounding, at first, like a slick, almost glib impersonation of Harry Connick Jr. But as he made his way through the song, he started to push at the words, shove them up against each other, bat them around, his voice rising up and hammering the lyrics. It wasn't all pretty, but he was trying to wring something extra out of the song, something worthwhile he couldn't find any other way.
Extroverted Cullum gushes with youthful enthusiasm, his fresh face smiling slyly from under the bird's-nest hair. He jumped off the piano, plucked at the strings inside, slapped it like a conga drum, bashed the keys with his elbows. Wearing ripped jeans, an untucked shirt and a rumpled jacket, all of which he soon shed, stripping down to a worn brown T-shirt, he hunched over the keyboard, his legs apart, his knees bent, coiled like a spring.
With a strong four-piece band switching around on instruments behind him, Cullum attacked the piano, playing three styles of jazz or more at once. But he does not play chamber jazz -- he manhandles the stuff, plays it rock-music loud and shouts "Thank yew" after every number as if he were addressing a soccer stadium.
As imaginative as he is -- hearing entirely new songs in such unexpected places as Jimi Hendrix ("The Wind Cries Mary") or Radiohead ("High and Dry"), it is his own songs where he plumbs the depths of his expression, such as the wrenching "Lover, You Should Have Come Over" or the powerful "Nothing I Do" from his new album, "Catching Tales."
Without any easy, marketable categorization, the post-download music industry is going to have trouble understanding Jamie Cullum. But there were teenage girls at the show screaming as if he were 'N Sync alongside hippie senior citizens who danced at the Fillmore. It was a love fest, and Cullum clearly wants to be loved.
He's going to get his wish. People are smarter than radio programmers.