Pianist plays pop and jazz, both old and new, in his first performance since birth of his daughter in March
Jamie Cullum could not be described as edgy, but he loves jazz passionately and wants a lot more people to get its point. "It's only the second time I've been out of the house since my child was born," he informed an adoring crowd at the Cheltenham jazz festival, "and it's being simulcast in 75 cinemas in six countries."
After a nervous start to a rare one-man show, his first gig since the birth of his daughter in March, Cullum, the festival's guest director, rattled through two sets of pop covers, new recordings and songs he'd played years ago as a wine bar pianist, performing with all the gleeful boyish bounce, rollercoaster momentum and Sinatra-to-soul sound that has made him a star.
With undoubtedly intentional irony, he began with the garrulous and mildly caustic I Want to Be a Pop Star from 2003's Pointless Nostalgic album and threw the jazz fans a bone by driving a traditional stride-piano groove under it. Over two sets in which his growing relaxation wasn't just evident from his shedding of jacket and tie but from increasingly spontaneous twists and turns in the music, Cullum then shifted up the gears.
The standard Comes Love started sultry but swelled over peremptorily punchy chords, the classic Nina Simone vehicle Feeling Good was interwoven with You Got the Love, and vocalese legend Bob Dorough's But for Now got an unfussily tender treatment that reinforced how much Cullum cares about old school love song subtleties.
But it was a yearning account of Radiohead's High and Dry, and a version of Fran Landesman's classic Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most – in which he riskily but successfully joined intimate balladry to beatboxing – that lingered longest in the mind.
It may be a jazz festival, but Cheltenham is not about bare-bulb basements and shadowy characters in pork-pie hats blowing saxes. Children were turning cartwheels on the grass amid white marquees in the bank holiday sunshine, while the silver-haired, the rainbow-haired and the no-haired picked their way through sunbathers, fans and bands.
In the distance a guitarist sounding more like 21st-century Hendrix than 1940s Django Reinhardt ripped power chords through a ragged horn section. Meanwhile, the tents and the sober municipal buildings around the town centre's Imperial Gardens housed some of the hippest, coolest and most legendarily long-in-the-tooth jazz musicians from Europe and the United States. found themselves surreally flung together in an English country town, celebrating blue sky with hot dogs, reddening flesh, and plastic pints of lager.
Sunday had begun with an artist much closer to the jazz world's idea of a star, the 2010 Mercury prize contender Kit Downes. The previous day, the young British pianist/composer had premiered a pin-sharp yet freewheeling piece for animator Lesley Barnes' and BBC scientist Adam Rutherford's educational show on evolution, and joined in some mind-boggling rhythmic conundrums in a new band led by composer Django Bates.
But on Sunday his powerful sextet explored his own themes inspired by Scandinavian folk songs, fast contemporary bebop, and Skip James. Former Brand New Heavies keyboardist Neil Cowley then showed he retains a rousing penchant for jackhammering rock-piano, even alongside an acoustic trio and on this mostly thunderous but sometimes cinematically brooding set, a string quartet.
A huge ascetic contrast followed from Norwegian Tord Gustavsen, a hitmaker in his homeland with acoustic music of tiny, trickling motifs, softly brushed cymbals and quietly humming double-bass parts. Gustavsen's discreet gospel roots and his musical meticulousness bring audiences to awed silence, and his Jan Garbarek-like saxophonist Tore Brunborg was flawlessly attuned to the atmosphere.
Jazz from the States was less in evidence than it would have been on any UK jazz festival even a decade ago, a measure of the increasingly independent jazz identities of Europe. But America's Overtone Quartet, featuring pianist Jason Moran and saxophonist Chris Potter, rubbed home the enduring power of jazz music's birthplace, and featured double-bass and drum solos that were models of clarity and melodic strength in bassist Larry Grenadier's case, and tunefulness, drama and racing momentum in drummer Eric Harland's.
"Thanks for supporting live music," was a key message in Cullum's farewell. The whole day at Cheltenham was an amen to that.