The Piano Owes Him Nothing

Jamie Cullum doesn’t play jazz so much as he wrestles it. He takes songs you thought you already understood—Radiohead, Hendrix, whatever’s sitting at the top of the cultural pile—runs them through a piano, and hands them back transformed in a way that shouldn’t always work but almost always does. The trick is that he does it without reverence. He does it like a man with something to prove.

What I keep coming back to is how physical the whole thing is. He’s compact, all coiled energy, and his live performances look like the piano owes him money. He climbs on it. He throws himself at it. There’s a class of musician who exists fully only in a room with an audience, where recordings are just the evidence left behind, and Cullum belongs entirely to that class.

His charm—and he has a considerable amount of it—never tips into the irritating variety. He covers famous songs without the self-congratulation that usually attaches to the form. He writes his own material without retreating into jazz-purist territory that would lose everyone he’d worked to attract. That balance is harder to maintain than it looks, and for a while there, he made it look easy.