“I’m very fond of Settle. It’s a lovely place with some nice pubs and places to eat and that beautiful hall which has been renovated and looked after by such a great team.”
Her new album, Twelve o’clock Tales, is a collaboration with the Hallé orchestra, with their impressive 93 musicians appearing on the record. “Obviously,” Clare told us, “I won’t be bringing all of those to Settle but generally when I’m not working with orchestras or big bands I work with my trio.”
What was working with the Hallé orchestra like? In one word from Clare it was ‘Amazing’.
“I get to work with orchestras up and down the land but the Hallé are a very wonderful bunch of people. It was last June and we’d done a couple of concerts together and I was having a beer in the bar with the conductor Stephen Bell and happened to mention about recording with them. It’s taken about ten months and I never thought it would happen but we made it a reality.
“You take it for granted that orchestras are going to be amazing musicians but you don’t always take it for granted that they’ll be thoroughly nice people but these lot are! They were so accommodating and lovely.”
Clare has been working with the trio for around a decade and said it was always fun to work with them, both on and off stage.
“We cover as many bases as is earthly possible. We have fantastic musicians. It’s a mixture of all sorts of jazz, it’s just that I’m interested in the record centred around really great songs that were originally made famous by the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, and Doris Day, but we also do more contemporary material such as Sting and Van Morrison, and a few originals as well.
“It’s probably because I’ve got the attention span of a goldfish that we keep changing what we’re doing.”
The album ‘Twelve o’clock Tales’ takes its name from a track called ‘Lush Life’, originally by Billy Strayhorn, which appears on the album. “Guy Barker, a good friend who is behind a lot of the arrangements on the album as well as being a world class trumpeter in his own right, is [like me] a big Strayhorn fan.”
Though not a hugely well-known name now, Strayhorn was the right-hand man of famous musician Duke Ellington. “He wrote a lot of Ellington’s greatest works and no one really knew who wrote because Billy could write in the style of Ellington effortlessly but he wrote ‘Lush Life’ when he was sixteen years old and it’s probably on every jazz singer’s list as it’s very difficult to sing.
“It seemed a good nod to his genius to call the album that.”
Clare talked passionately about her love for Doris Day and the eagerness for her and her trio to take requests for the audience and see if they can play them. “That’s the great thing about working with jazz musicians is that they can generally do whatever you want in whatever key you want so it doesn’t take too long to get it off and running!”
In terms of her musical hero, Clare Teal confirmed it would be Ella Fitzgerald. “Of all the singers I listen to I always come back to her as she has this extraordinary tone of voice, this wonderful instrument, of many octaves. She could sing absolutely anything. But it is the joy that she puts in her music that we get out of it and that’s what I try to do in every single song we perform, to make people feel good.”
We asked Clare about how her work on radio has influenced her music taste. “I’ve been working for Radio 2 for about twelve years or so now, and my Big Band Show was always pre-recorded and scripted, so when it was extended by an hour and went live three years ago I finally had the ability to choose what I wanted to play, and this was music I really feel passionate about and I like to play the best music that I can so people realise how exciting this stuff is, and how talented these musicians were and are.
“By having that radio show I have to listen to music every week and sometimes when you’re on the rod you’re so focussed on what you’re doing yourself you don’t have time to listen to what other people are doing, and you forget how important music is for your general well-being. You need it in your life, it helps you feel good, and express your emotions. It can lock down your memories; it’s pretty magical stuff!
“Taking time out to listen to music can only make you a more fun person to live with!”
Get your tickets for the event on Thursday 26th May at http://www.settlevictoriahall.org.uk/prog/2016/may_teal.html
This interview will feature in KBPS #9 available Saturday 14th May.
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