An aural calling card of an alert for anyone into finding new UK jazz vocals talent. Cardiff scene singer Elijah Jeffery and pianist Eddie Gripper are encountered here on their first recording together. Jeffrey studied at the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama – the Oxford born Gripper, the more established of the pair, Cardiff University.
Gripper’s trio record Home released in 2023 was a tonic. His style is a little like that of rising star Joe Hill who has worked with the likes of James Hudson on Moonray and fine Northern Irish classical tenor Andrew Irwin.
But you can’t really compare Home and Elijah Jeffery & Eddie Gripper because Home showed Gripper’s chops more fully and the context is different. Here this is more a singer’s record with piano folded in decorously, Gripper an empathetic Boswell to Jeffery’s Dr Johnson given the almost diary-like rhapsodic quality of the lyrics and the way Gripper wraps these in apposite flourishes and deft elaborations.
Jeffery’s voice lands somewhere between that of Ian Shaw and Joe Stilgoe in style. The songs are largely originals and work on an easy going level never becoming too dark even if that is the general direction. They are quite soft and gentle, sort of singer/songwriter like in a broad ranging generic sense.
His solo recording One of Her Clowns was an EP that came out a few years ago and on which Gripper was also a part of along with other players.
In addition to the originals there’s a stirring, creatively re-arranged, version of Henry Purcell’s ‘Dido’s Lament.’
It’s a piece that attracted the Swingle Singers and the Modern Jazz Quartet in the 1960s. Alison Moyet did a luxuriantly arranged version of the lament on her 2004 album Voice.
Belfast scene trumpeter and bandleader Linley Hamilton, who co-runs the rural Magy’s Farm jazz venue in County Down, in the notes says that Elijah Jeffery & Eddie Gripper “was written and recorded within just 8 weeks”. That’s a remarkable feat. Word of its worth is understandably beginning to seep out – I read about it first in the award winning blog, The Jazz Mann.
Certainly we as a listening community need more male jazz singers on the UK scene of Jeffery’s quality to develop their craft on records. And this is a promising early career effort that would encourage anyone who hears it to go hear the duo in person.
- Hear the duo at Mayank Patel’s Hampstead Jazz Club in London downstairs in his New End pub the Duke of Hamilton on 10 July.
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