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On a sultry evening on Bologna’s Piazza Verdi, the audience is waiting for
Melody Gardot and her band to make their appearance on the open-air stage.
Amy Winehouse’s songs are roaring from the speakers — an ironic touch,
really, because Gardot’s intimate ballads are a million miles from the
English girl’s brash showmanship. Winehouse grabs you by the throat; Gardot
invites you to pull up a chair, bend your head forward and listen closely.
Her songs are as soft and delicate as a whisper.
This is her first visit to Italy, and, though she scarcely ventures further
than an occasional “grazie”, she slowly draws her listeners into the heart
of the music as she switches between acoustic guitar and piano. We soon pay
no heed to the noise of buses or scooters. Passers-by who had been
chattering on the edge of the crowd gradually allow their eyes to wander
towards the bandstand. Gardot’s voice tends to have that effect on people,
which is why the dreamy young singer-songwriter from Philadelphia is already
being spoken of as a rival to Norah Jones.
The difference is that Gardot’s work, for all its stylish veneer of Joni
Mitchell-ish pop and occasional twang of country-and-western romance,
contains a deeper strain of jazz. Like the footloose Madeleine Peyroux, she
is winning over the kind of listeners who probably never thought they liked
jazz. In reality, Gardot is almost as much of a beginner as many of her
admirers. When I arrive at her tiny hotel room the next morning, her laptop
is playing Charles Mingus.
She listens hard to part of a saxophone line, enraptured by the slow bending
of the note. Yet it turns out that she is not an old Mingus hand at all. She
had first encountered the great bassist-composer’s volcanic recordings only
a month earlier, courtesy of the musicians in her band.
She is absorbing new names all the time. One day it is Bessie Smith, the next
Anita O’Day. Her tastes wander far across the blues, pop and world-music
spectrum, from plantation songs recorded by the musicologist Alan Lomax to a
slab of material by her favourite artist, the chameleon-like Brazilian
master Caetano Veloso. She keeps the music playing during our conversation,
pointing out snippets she admires and at one point echoing Veloso’s keening
phrases.
Gardot, you see, is at that happy stage of her career when she soaks up
influences almost effortlessly. “With a band that knows so much, and me
knowing so little, I’m always in a position to learn more,” she says.
“That’s a good place to be. I feel that none of us truly masters one thing
in a lifetime, but it helps to have beautiful people surrounding you. I’m
like a sailboat surrounded by beautiful breezes.”
What makes her achievement all the more impressive is that she is living with
the consequences of a near-fatal traffic accident that left her with serious
physical and neurological disabilities. She wears tinted glasses because of
her extreme sensitivity to light, and uses a walking cane to move around on
stage. Strapped to her waist, much of the time, is a small device — a Tens
machine — that emits electronic impulses to curb the pain. Touring can be an
ordeal. The curtains are drawn when I arrive in mid-afternoon; incense is
burning. Gardot, who seems immune to self-pity, jokingly explains how one of
her first priorities on arriving at a hotel is checking that her room has a
good bathtub. Long soaks in epsom salts and healing oils are among her ways
of dealing with life on the road.
The accident happened when she was 19. Cycling near a junction, she was struck
by a 4WD that had jumped the lights. Her pelvis was shattered and head
injuries erased her short-term memory. Bedridden for a year, she consulted a
string of doctors before one of them, who took a special interest in the
effect of music on theneural pathways, suggested that she take up the guitar
and songwriting. Gardot had already been making some money by playing in
piano bars. During her convalescence, she embarked on the long and painful
journey to the recording of what was to become her first album, Worrisome
Heart.
Her long hair half hidden beneath a beret, Gardot rests on her bed as we talk.
She seems particularly frail today, but is clearly reluctant to go into too
much detail. Music is what matters most of all — she laughs at the memory of
how, when she first wore the Tens machine for a concert, it caused a buzzing
sound on her guitar pick-up. It took her a good 20 minutes to realise what
was causing the problem.
The night before, in her show, there was a sense that her energy levels were
dipping. The urban setting, for all its allure, had its drawbacks in terms
of distractions. “It was difficult,” Gardot admits. “Our music is at times
so intimate, you sometimes think you almost need the stillness of a field
for people to be able get it.” Her penchant for ballads can also make
excessive demands on an audience’s concentration. By and large, however, the
approach pays dividends. “I kind of see music in two ways,” she explains.
“It’s just like in speech. If you hear someone who talks loud and fast,
you’re going to back away. If you’ve got someone who talks slowly and
softly, you might get annoyed, because you have to strain to listen. But
there’s that middle ground that can be inviting.”
This is music that is full of silences. The instrumentation is unusually stark
— just bass, drums and trumpet for the most part, with Gardot adding subtle
textures on keyboard and guitar. As she observes: “It’s more challenging to
play less. They’ve all come to me and said that. It’s fun to play a lot of
notes, because they can goof off, but they love the challenge of having to
underplay.
To tell a drummer to go slowly, I think that’s harder than going fast. He has
to play delicately and consciously. You have to play the notes that aren’t
there, as it were.”
Music is worthless, Gardot believes, unless it comes from the heart. Before
every concert, she and her musicians hold hands and join in a prayer in
which everyone asks the spirits of great players of the past to watch over
the performance. On stage, there is a hint of the mysterious vamp about her.
The clothes and hairstyle have an unmistakeable touch of bohemian chic, as
befits a former art and fashion student. Face to face, though, she looks
much younger, much more endearingly girlish. If she can seem cool and
distant when she is performing, it is her all-embracing enthusiasm that
makes the biggest impression in conversation.
When I notice a copy of Tchaikovsky’s diaries on the table, Gardot talks about
her love of Dostoevsky, Tom Stoppard and the theatre of the absurd. (“It’s
funny: one of the themes of my tours is waiting around for me. You know,
Waiting for Gardot.”) She discovered the diaries in her local library. The
copy was so old that the librarian would not allow it to be taken out of the
building, so Gardot used to visit every day simply to read a few more pages.
In another life, she says, she might have been a teacher.
Her art training constantly comes into play. “I see all my music in colours,”
she says. “When things feel good, they blend together, like watercolours. If
it’s not right, they stay linear — the reds, the blues and the rest are
completely separate. I always draw analogies to painting, which drives my
musicians insane. In fact, at one point I kept saying ‘frame’ instead of
‘bar’. They said, ‘What are you talking about?’ ”
Gardot did learn music theory when she was much younger, but most of it has
been forgotten now. She pauses and stares into space. “Perhaps it is an
advantage in some ways,” she says. “I feel freer not thinking in circles of
fifths.” Yes indeed, the heart has its own reasons.
Melody Gardot performs at the Bloomsbury Theatre, WC1, tomorrow
It rests its head on your shoulders and whispers in your ear
Simply beautiful
Ana Moreira, Estoril, Portugal