Funky to the core

Al Jarreau is thoughtful. "I don't think of music categories when I hear a song I like," he says, peering into the depths of his coffee cup.

"Music may well fall into categories for other people and I understand the convenience of that, but for me, if I like a song I have to do it, and that's that." Abruptly he looks up with one of the 100-watt smiles that are never far from the surface.

"I sing Al Jarreau music. I sit on your shoulder and whisper in your ear. I open minds and walk through many doors." The kind of lyrical imagery at work here is almost like the improvised flights of vocal fantasy he launches into on stage, when suddenly he takes a song in new and unexpected directions.

One of those rare artists to have won Grammy awards for Best Vocalist in three categories - jazz, pop and R&B - Jarreau pledges allegiance to virtuosity and entertainment, taking an impish delight in his refusal to be conveniently pigeonholed. At a spry 60 (he looks 20 years younger) his adventurous spirit is more or less intact, and he is quick to point out that no one is any closer to pinpointing what he does than when he started singing professionally in 1968.

"If there is a backbone to what I do," he concedes, "it's the jazz vernacular - that is, to be in the moment on stage or in performance and allow the things that are your influences to come to that moment and affect how you improvise. Not to get locked in how the melody goes, but state the melody and find a new melody."

After a five-year recording hiatus, his latest album, Tomorrow Today (GRP), is out next week. "I'm real happy with it," he beams. "As a recording artist I've been away for a while, although I've done more concerts last year than at any time in my life. This record does touch on all those parts that make up Al Jarreau - the jazz guy, the pop guy the R&B guy - it's all in there. The real challenge with this album was that I wanted listeners to feel comfortable with what they've come to expect, but surprise them a little with something they might not have thought about. That's what they get when they come to my concerts, so why not on an album?"

As ever, Jarreau covers a wide range of music, but his highly personal style is the unifying factor that pulls the diverse musical idioms he likes to inhabit under one roof. The title track is a blistering Latin piece that announces his return to the recording studios with a typical flourish, "I had this idea a long time ago. I wanted to do a salsa song called Tomorrow Today, and for the past 18 months I've been performing that song and telling people that's going to be the name of my next album. Then when it came to be released someone wanted to call it something else, so we had a big fight about what was or wasn't the right title."

Another album highlight sees him returning to his jazz roots. "I'd been working on a lyric for a famous Weather Report tune called A Remark You Made. We're calling this piece Something You Said on the album, written by Joe Zawinul originally, to feature the bass player Jaco Pastorius. I'm daring to think I could write a lyric for such a classic piece of music, but after thinking about it for 20 years, here it is, a great piece of music that shows how Al Jarreau loves to write lyrics for other people's music."

That lyric writing skill was inspired by the new breed of singer-songwriters spawned by the 1960s rock explosion, "I was deeply affected by the poetry in Bob Dylan's music, the poetry in Joni Mitchell's music and the poetry in Laura Nyro's music, the poetry of wanting to say something," he says. "If you have that platform, it's what you want to say and how you say it that counts - you must say it with everything you have, with intellect and feeling. Originally it was my family who touched and influenced me. My Dad was a Minister and I sang in church alongside my sisters and brothers just as soon as I could walk. It was they who brought Ellington and Diz and Ella into the house and influenced me to try and sing jazz."

Initially, however, music was not the only thing in his life. He excelled at sports and was an above-average student throughout high school and university. While singing was strictly for fun, he graduated with a degree in psychology that led to a master's in Vocational Rehabilitation from the University of Iowa. Moving to San Francisco, he began a career in rehabilitation counselling, but in the late 1960s began singing in a jazz trio led by pianist George Duke. "I finally realised the thing I loved most was the thing I should be doing, and it wasn't until I was 28 that I decided to make music my only source of income."

Although he had considerable TV exposure, it wasn't until 1975 - during an extended stay at the Bla Bla Club in Los Angeles - that he was signed by Warner Bros. By then he had introduced another strand to his music. "I had fallen absolutely in love with Brazilian music," he recalled, "a very important element in my rhythmical approach to singing." His debut album, We Got By got rave notices, and after his 1977 world tour, his third album, Look To The Rainbow, marked the first of five Grammy awards that would come his way.

In recent years Jarreau has been performing with symphony orchestras: "I do Bach's Air on a G String and my version of Faure's Sicilienne. And I love rap - I mean if you don't understand the significance of that, then you're dealing with dead music, go live in the cemetery. I'm a guy who knows the importance of Miles and Dizzy but doesn't think everything has got to be played in that idiom. I really love being a fine technical artist and singing a song well. Folks who have that appreciation for a melody that's sung well and sits well against certain chord changes know it takes more than three chord changes to make it all happen. I just regret that there is a whole generation out there who have limited experience with all that. That's why I hope Tomorrow Today might reach them, it's funky to the core. Hey, I gotta have me some of that swamp funk! And I gotta get me some Dvorak, Dizzy and Sly Stone too."