Beverley Beirne - Featured Artist - 21/09/2018
I'm a Yorkshire Lass, with Irish roots. I came to singing
because of the absolute joy it gives me. It's something
I've always done, singing along to Dad's jazz records,
or Mum's Abba collection, or to anything actually! It's
just a part of me, I find it deeply soul fulfilling.
Professionally, I started singing classically. Which,
when I look back, was an excellent beginning,
because it gave me a real grounding in the physical
elements of singing, a real understanding
of how the voice works? I then experimented;
being in a Rock Band, musical theatre, but behind
all this was my innate love of jazz. I hated to sing
a song straight, I always wanted to put my mark
on it, sing off the beat, sing the harmony, feel the music my own way, walk my own path.
I think that's what drew me into jazz more and
more, that sense of personal identity, self-expression. That's why picking the right tunes
really is so important, I want to feel it, express
it, live that song for that moment. A teacher once told me that you don't choose the
music, it chooses you and I really do believe that. There is as such, a sense of destiny about it sometimes.
NEW ALBUM JJWTHF
Why JJWTHF? Why now? Well, it had been in my head that I really wanted to record another album and I had a few ideas but the one that really just resonated with me the most was Jazz Just Wants. I get a lot of deep personal joy from taking songs from other genres and tinkering with them, to see if I can turn them into a jazz tune. It's something that I'd been inco-orporating into my gigs for a while. The first song on JJWTHF 'Come On Feel The Noize' I first did about 4 years ago at Matt & Phreds, Manchester at a Christmas gig, the audiences reaction to this was really inspirational and just got me thinking and wondering. My last album being 2012, it was about time I did another. The songs on JJWTHF are the result of 2 years of playing with a variety of tunes from that time. It was really important that I kept the spirit of the
original tune, even if it sounded quite different, the lyrics were also very important to me, these had to resonate with me too.
I toyed with just putting one or two interpretations on an album of standards and maybe one or two of my own, but in the end I just had this gut feeling that I should just go the whole hog and do a full album of these. I had about 90 at the time I was tinkering with and I just felt they were really strong and I should be courageous and do the whole album. Part of me felt it might be a bit of a risk, as people do like their jazz singers to sing standards, which believe me I love, but this was in me and it had to come out…a homage to my childhood in many ways, a mixture of both jazz and 70's and 80's pop and as I say, I do like to walk my own path…