Why Teal's the real deal

The charts are full of jazz singers, not all of them memorable, but everyone is hoping Clare Teal's incredible voice will take her to the top, writes Stuart Nicholson

Tomorrow evening Clare Teal launches her new CD, Don't Talk, on Michael Parkinson's ITV chat show. It's the kind of push most new artists can only dream of. Singing ones of her own compositions with a roaring big band, she'll be reaching an audience of millions. Record-business insiders are quietly predicting that sales will take off, and Parkinson himself couldn't be more enthusiastic. "Clare's the entire package," he said when I met him at the country pub he owns, just outside London, a few weeks ago. He's a knowledgeable jazz fan and quietly goes out of his way to help up-and-coming talents such as Teal. "I think this record will really take off for her," he went on. "It's the best record I've heard from a British artist since . . . well, I can't remember when. I've been really excited about it. I just think she's paid her dues. I went to a couple of gigs and I was convinced. You just know. I think they've actually done her proud on this record."

After 10 years in the business Teal seems set to become an overnight success. A few months ago she was at the centre of a bidding war between the record giants Universal and Sony. It was a rerun of their battle to sign Jamie Cullum. On that occasion Universal won, with a remarkable €2 million deal for the young singer, whose album, Twentysomething, promptly went double platinum and shot up the charts behind Norah Jones and Katie Melua to give jazz albums the top three spots for the first time in 48 years of UK album-chart history. All of a sudden jazzy singers are selling records by the bucketload. So when Sony went after Teal it was a high-stakes game. This time it made sure it got its artist, with a deal that reportedly topped Cullum's - itself one of the biggest deals ever for a jazz artist.

The rise of the jazzy singers has taken the record business by surprise. An industry geared to the youth market - on the lookout for the next teenage rapper or indie heroes - has been left scratching its head at this clean-living bunch singing songs twice as old as they are. Suddenly, we're up to here in jazz singers: there's jazz singers, there's singers with a bit of Norah Jones whimsy, there's young pop and soul singers singing jazzy stuff and there's even an unreconstituted rocker such as Rod Stewart singing the Great American Song Book. But Teal is the real deal, a jazz singer through and through.

No sooner had the ink dried on her contract with Sony than she was in the recording studio. The first session was on one of those unseasonably warm May days that prompt everyone to act as if it's dress-down Friday. Even at 9.15 a.m. the sun was hot enough to make Islington, in north London, seem Mediterranean, all pavement cafés, lattes and sunglasses. Down a side street Angel Recording Studio was coming to life. On the stripped-pine studio floor saxophonists and trumpeters were warming up and microphones and cable were everywhere. As Tony Platt, Teal's producer, worked on balances, a cheerful "Morning, everyone" announced Teal's arrival. Already she was cracking jokes, and the studio's seriousness was broken by roars of laughter.

Simon Wallace, the album's musical director, called for I Just Want To Make Love To You, and the band ran it down. They went for a take, Teal in the vocal booth, the band live on the studio floor. Teal, who was standing barefoot and giving it all she'd got, was clearly a very good singer, despite all the people who were proclaiming her a very good singer. At the end of the song the band broke into applause as Platt announced over the PA: "That's a take!"

Three months later she was about to preview six songs from Don't Talk for 50 media movers and shakers at Claridge's, one of London's swankiest hotels. Parkinson mingled with the guests, a joke here, a nod and a wink there. "Everyone was up one end, and it was me and Simon down the other. Very odd," Teal recalls. "The whole reason for just having a pianist was that I could do it live and that, if you can do it just with a piano, then it's a demonstration of a point."

With a small PA and piano accompaniment Teal effortlessly ran through the songs. Between each number she surprised those who had not seen her perform, and delighted those who had, by demonstrating a gift for comedy. Her apparently off-the-cuff humour, like a younger version of Victoria Wood's, instantly won over the music-biz pros.

Able to marry words and music in a way that only the best singers can, Teal brings sophistication and wit to the popular song form. She is widely read - "I'm reading this book on Venetian art, and do you know there's a lot more in it than I really need to know?" - but unlikely to take herself too seriously. Her ability to laugh at herself is something she's needed in the past 10 years. Born and raised in Shipton, in Yorkshire, she developed a fascination with jazz from her father's 78s.

"They were in this trunk, and on novelty Sunday afternoons it would be carted down from the attic, and then we'd get these amazing discs out - and I was so excited by it," she recalls with a laugh. "Lots of British dance bands - Harry Roy, Joe Loss - and I was a massive Geraldo fan. At six: what a geek."

From a young age she was more interested in jazz singers than in pop. "I'd sit and imitate these singers: listen and hone and imitate, listen and hone and imitate," she says. "A very useful thing in retrospect, but at the time probably a bit odd."

After lessons on electric organ and formal studies on clarinet she went to music college - "Got a good degree" - and then went into advertising. Work for new jazz singers was so limited as to be virtually non-existent. Then came a break, to fill in at a jazz festival. It went so well that she resolved to make a serious attempt to build a career as a singer. A demo for the UK's biggest jazz indie, Candid, resulted in a contract, and from a gig diary with just one date the northern work ethic kicked in, as she set about calling around for work. "I'd phone as somebody else: 'Hey, have you heard this great jazz singer?' That's when my training in advertising came in handy. Everything has a purpose."

After three albums on Candid, and after interminable one-night stands criss-crossing the UK - "It's always Devon on a Saturday and Yorkshire on a Sunday: you can guarantee it" - she found a manager, David Carr, who took her career to the next level. "In my line of work I've come across hundreds of good singers but very rarely somebody who obviously had an exceptional talent," says Carr. "I was shocked at the hardship she was facing. It was simply a case of her needing somebody inside the music business that could help."

National radio play, a string of high- profile gigs, an initial TV appearance last November, also on Parkinson's show, and a major-label contract quickly followed. "Even last year I had no idea this would happen at all," says Teal. "When we had the Parkinson call the only national television I had done was Points West [ the BBC's western-England news programme]. Nobody knew who I was, and that's not changed very much at all, except in Waitrose [ a supermarket] in Bath. I do get stopped there, usually when I'm buying lavatory cleaner."

For Teal the vocal boom couldn't have come at a better moment. Unlike several young singers who have been signed in advance of artistic maturity, she is, at 31, just hitting her peak. Two years ago she was responsible for giving Jamie Cullum a push into the big time when she recommended him to Candid; now it's her turn.

"This facet of the music business seems to be doing well right now. Long may it continue," she says. "Even if it doesn't I can look back and think, wow, we did this. I made absolutely the best album at this moment in time in my life. I was able to get so much music in it: we go from big band to big ballad to small-band arrangement, and it was a really fun project, everyone had a laugh. And that's a nice thing to carry around with you."

Don't Talk is on Sony