When Clare Teal was studying the clarinet, she used to go to shopping arcades with her mum and imagine Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers leaping in and out of the aisles. She was convinced she had been dropped into the wrong era. That yearning for another age comes through strongly when you hear this accomplished young jazz singer from Yorkshire. The music sounds as though it should be coming out of a Bakelite radio or a gramophone horn.
Teal has just launched her second CD, Orsino's Songs. It is a mix of classic Broadway material and new work, with an emphasis on swing and a natural buoyancy. Teal is very musicianly: some of the underplayed feints, turns and slurs in her phrasing seem to echo what she might have learned on the clarinet. She has a wider span than many of her smaller-voiced contemporaries, and inhabits the emotional space of material such as Billie Holiday ballads as if she belonged there.
At the Pizza Express Jazz Club, Teal balanced subtlety and extroversion with signature ease. She hid the implications of Holiday's You're My Thrill for much of the song, only to let them out in sudden confessional floods, while the saxophonist Trevor Whiting built an exquisite Coleman Hawkins-like tenor solo on them, slithery sounds periodically gathered up by sudden nimble trots across the chords. Teal was a little buried in the mix on The Way You Look Tonight, but gave highly personal spins to the original melody in the final choruses. Whiting, now on alto, topped his previous effort with hovering phrases and a quivering, sensual tone.
The Bakelite radio effect was at its most evocative in a waltz on How Little We Know. Just One of Those Things began romantically and accelerated to an eager clip, with Teal's subtle timing allowing her to improvise without making an exhibition of it - almost imperceptibly pulling at the pulse, imparting the faintest of yodelling sounds to a turning phrase, gently twisting her internal volume control. Messing With Fire, an original mid-tempo swinger, confirmed that although Teal keeps her own material on the back burner, it wouldn't be out of place nearer the front.
