Jazzwise #95 February 2006

Ian Shaw has long been regarded as the UK’s leading male jazz singer, capable of delivering interpretations of a wide variety of jazz-relates songs with a devastating emotional punch. Recently signed to Linn records the Welsh-born singer turns to Joni Mitchell for his debut on the label with a Joni-themed album. Andy Robson talks to Shaw about Joni and also his work as a producer to up-and-coming jazz singers and as mentor and voice coach to "crazy chick" Charlotte Church

"Why an album of Joni songs? Because I wanted to beat Elvis Costello to it!"
Anything else Ian Shaw wants to beat the sad-eyed Crooner to?
" Er, his wife?"
Now there’s a thought, the puckish Welsh lad in pursuit of Krall the Canadian song bird… would it all end in Costello and Shaw rolling around in a spit and sawdust bar room fight? Ear studs at 15 paces? Perhaps we shouldn’t go there.

Let’s return instead to Shaw and that other Canadian singer, songwriter and all round diva, Joni Mitchell.

Shaw is talking to Jazzwise midway through recording Drawn To All Things, an album of Mitchell covers, featuring old muckers of Britain’s top male singer such as Claire Martin and Lea Delaria, and new lions like guitar tyro David Preston and Janette Mason who arranged four of the songs. This is Shaw’s Linn debut and it’s getting the full-on, big production treatment, replete with strings and the hiring of class acts of the order of Guy Barker and Nigel Hitchcock.

Although there have been Joni songs in Shaw’s repertoire for 15 years, and indeed he did a show with Claire Martin mixing Mitchell songs with songs of the 40s and 50s, this is still a risky project. By covering just one artist, Shaw is going down an eggs-in-one-basket route that could alienate those who aren’t Joni fans. He kind of did it before with a Rogers and Hart anthology (Taking It To Hart) "and that was the worst record ever put out by any singer ever," he laughs. And he means it.

" It’s an inappropriate combination of forces, me singing Joni, a 43-year-old little Welsh bloke singing songs by a wafty North American woman. People still have this thing about her, that she’s long hair and a folkie, despite all the things she’s done to dispel it. I mean, I’d never buy a album of Joni covers," he says – and then, typically, remembers he has bought albums just to hear the cover of a Joni song, like Dave Newton’s version of ‘Both Sides Now’, "a lovely rhapsodic ramble, which, of course, is not his usual style."

And a lovely rhapsodic ramble is a bit like how it is talking to Ian Shaw. On stage he can appear sober, nay gloomy, with occasional bursts of sharp humour [remember, this guy started as a stand up comedy double act in the mid-80s, treading the boards alongside Julian Clary and the alt comedy generation]. But in conversation he’s relaxed, allusive, funny, generous, scurrilous, affectionately bitchy, scatting from subject to subject, losing his way, then finding his way back, often through the most unlikely of anecdotes. A bit like one of his improvs then.