Elijah Jeffery & Eddie Gripper

“Elijah Jeffery & Eddie Gripper”

(Self Released)

Elijah Jeffery – vocals, Eddie Gripper – piano

Released on June 6th 2025 this eponymous, self released album represents the debut recording by the Cardiff based duo of vocalist Elijah Jeffery and pianist Eddie Gripper.

Jeffery is a graduate of the Jazz Course at the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama (RWCMD) and met Gripper, a graduate of the music course at Cardiff University on the city’s jazz circuit. Both are hugely talented young musicians who are beginning to make a name for themselves on the wider national jazz scene.

Gripper established himself with the release in 2023 of his album “Home”, a stunningly mature debut recorded in a trio format with bassist Ursula Harrison, a future BBC Young Jazz Musician of the Year, and American born drummer  Isaac Zuckerman. It was a recording that attracted national attention and served notice that in addition to being a hugely talented pianist Gripper was also a highly accomplished composer. The album received universally favourable reviews and Gripper subsequently toured the music widely, accompanied by Harrison and drummer Patrick Barrett-Donlon, who stepped into the drum chair when Zuckerman returned to the States. My review of the album can be found below and I have also covered several of the trio’s live shows at a variety of different locations.
https://www.thejazzmann.com/reviews/review/eddie-gripper-home

The versatile Gripper was also a founding member of the BMJ Collective, the house band at the Black Mountain Jazz Club in Abergavenny. In this capacity he performed with visiting musicians such as vocalist Marvin Muoneke, saxophonists Alex Clarke and Dan Newberry. He has also worked extensively with vocalist Debs Hancock.

More recently Gripper has co-led a quartet with Alex Clarke, a follow on from the BMJ collaboration with Clarke and Newberry. The Gripper / Clarke quartet also features Barrett-Donlon on drums and Nick Kacal on bass.

Gripper was also part of the quartet that Jeffery brought to Black Mountain Jazz in August 2024, a group that also included Kacal and Barrett-Donlon. An excellent group performance featured a mix of jazz standards and original songs and is reviewed here;
https://www.thejazzmann.com/reviews/review/elijah-jeffery-quartet-black-mountain-jazz-melville-centre-abergavenny-25-08-2024

I had previously enjoyed seeing Jeffery perform as a guest vocalist at two Brecon Jazz Festival events, firstly with the Siglo Section Big Band as part of the  2020 ‘Virtual’ Brecon Jazz Festival. and later ‘in the flesh’ with the Cardiff jazz, funk and soul ensemble Funkyard in 2023.

As a jazz vocalist Jeffery cites Mel Torme. Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra and Kurt Elling as primary sources of inspiration. He is happy to sing songs from the ‘Great American Songbook’ but during the lockdown period he began to write his own songs and in 2023 released his debut solo recording “One of Her Clowns”, an EP featuring five original songs, on which Jeffery sings and also plays guitar and electric bass. The personnel also includes Gripper on keyboards, Huw Llewellyn on trumpet and George Povey at the drums.

Another project with which Jeffery is involved is A Wheel Inside A Wheel, a jazz flavoured folk / Americana collaboration featuring fellow vocalist Sylvie Noble. Jeffery both sings and plays guitar with this quartet, which also features bassist Ursula Harrison and saxophonist Coren Sithers.

Jeffery has also worked with the Irish pianist Nils Kavanagh, a former Young Irish Jazz Musician of the Year award winner.

In the wake of the “One of Her Clowns” EP Jeffery and Gripper formed a songwriting partnership, the results of their collaboration coming to fruition with the release of this impressive debut album. The intrepid duo set themselves the challenge of writing and recording an entire album over the course of an eight week period during May and June 2024. The result is this collection of seven original songs plus an adaptation of the 17th century English composer Henry Purcell’s “Dido’s Lament”.

As with Gripper’s debut recording what immediately impresses the listener is the maturity of the writing, particularly from such young musicians. This is equally applicable to both the words and the music and it should be noted that the duo shared the songwriting duties equally, it was not just a question of Jeffery, who also trained as an actor, writing the words and Gripper the music. Instead the process was genuinely collaborative, notwithstanding the fact that this was the first time Gripper had written song lyrics.

The songs draw inspiration from both the ‘Great American Songbook’, a body of music loved by both participants, and from more contemporary pop and rock culture. The subject matter addresses a variety of different topics, some of them quite dark in nature – it’s not all ‘Songbook’ style love and romance.

Eddie was kind enough to give me a copy of the then yet to be released album in early May when I saw him and his trio of Kacal and Barrett-Donlon performing with guest saxophonist Dom Franks at the Suffolk Arms pub in Cheltenham where Gripper runs a regular residency. I’d therefore had the opportunity to do a bit of ‘homework’ before seeing the duo of Jeffery and Gripper perform at another Cheltenham venue, Smokey Joe’s, on June 5th 2025. I attended as a paying customer, so I’m reviewing the album rather than the show, but seeing the songs played and sung in the live performance environment helped to put them into context, while the on stage announcements, divided equally between the pair, offered some valuable insights and put more ‘flesh on the bones’. It was also good to see Dom Franks in what was admittedly a rather sparse audience (I’d expected the crowd from the Suffolk to be out in force), but in mitigation there had been some kind of mix up over the dates, the duo had originally been scheduled to play at Smokey’s the following week. On the plus side it meant that I was able to attend what proved to be an intimate and very enjoyable performance.

The Smokey Joe’s gig saw Jeffery and Gripper perform all eight songs from the album, albeit in a different running order, these interspersed with ‘Songbook’ standards plus a number of pop and rock tunes by artists who had been an influence on the duo’s own writing.

The standards included “Tea for Two” (including the rarely heard verse), “I’m Old Fashioned”, a Nat King Cole inspired “Walking My Baby Back Home” and “I’ve Never Been in Love Before”. There was also a version of “A Wish”, a tune written by the American pianist Fred Hersch with lyrics by the English vocalist Norma Winstone.

The rock and pop material included the Beatles songs “Mother Nature’s Son” and “Blackbird” (both from the ‘White Album’) and Joe Jackson’s “Different For Girls”, a 1979 song that represented a recent discovery for these two young men.

And so to the album, which I’ll tackle in the same running order as the disc. The album liner notes by the Irish trumpeter, composer, bandleader, broadcaster and educator Dr. Linley Hamilton help to set the scene and I reproduce them below;

“A brand-new album by two young titans who have collaborated in a focused project which reflects both their passion for music, and the strong desire to create. Written and recorded within 8 weeks, pianist Eddie Gripper and vocalist Elijah Jeffrey capture stories invented by two young men not afraid to explore themes of darkness and danger, balanced by hope and love in some of its many guises. There is no room for fear here.
The whole creative process, working together in a room with a piano and a well-schooled voice, was shared by both musicians together, determined to write, record and produce within the tightest of time frames. And musicians, a carefully chosen term, alluding to the output having precedence over their individual musical ability, so that the songs would, in essence, come first! This has been achieved with Eddie exploring a mix of conventional and complex chord voicings, unison melody lines, and thrilling improvisations that sparkle in this crossover original repertoire. Elijah demonstrates an authority augmented by an impressive vocal range, controlled vibrato, and an individual voice; the perfect tool to purvey their messages with an authoritative conveyance. Their impressive relationship with dynamics reinforces the intent of their compositions, and the narrative they generate nods to music being more than what they play, rather how they make the listener feel.”
I feel enthused after listening to this recording. I am excited for the future of both musicians and their desire to conceive projects that take them beyond the genres they have been brought up in. This is a journey that we are all invited to be a part of…”
Dr. Linley Hamilton MBE

Although jazz piano chords and jazz vocal phrasing are an essential part of the music this is an album that is primarily about the songs themselves rather than the technique of the performers, as Hamilton acknowledges. Yes there passages of unaccompanied piano but these are not really ‘jazz solos’ in the conventional sense, as impressive as Gripper’s playing might be.

The album commences with “Shifting Seasons”, one of only two songs from this collection to have been performed at that Abergavenny performance by the Jeffery quartet in August 2024, although that show also included two items from “One of Her Clowns”. Developed by the duo from one of Gripper’s melodic ideas the song features evocative and poetic lyrics that draw both on the ‘Songbook’ tradition and on more contemporary lyrical influences. The words address both the changing meteorological seasons but also similarly volatile and changeable emotional states.

Jeffery may have a warm well enunciated vocal style but that doesn’t prevent the duo from exploring darker, sometimes overtly political subject matter. Inspired by the 2024 elections in the UK and elsewhere “Good Honest Men” addresses the duplicity of politicians, albeit without naming any directly, while acknowledging the theatricality of the campaigning process. It’s one of those songs (often the best kind in my experience) that revels in the contrast between a sweet melody and an acerbic lyric. Although the songs sound very different the lyrical content reminds me of Van Der Graaf Generator’s “Every Bloody Emperor”, an even more scathing put down of two faced politicians, that appears on their 2005 comeback album “Present”, tellingly released in an election year.

As its title suggests “Close Your Eyes” actually addresses the subject of sleep and was originally written as a “Songs for Well-being” commission. However, as one has now come to expect from Jeffery and Gripper there’s more to it than that, it’s also a compelling account of unrequited love.

“Because of You” represents the duo’s attempt to write a song in the style of the ‘Great American Songbook’, in terms of both lyrics and harmonics. They succeed brilliantly with a song that very much encapsulates the feel of a jazz standard.

Following two love songs charting different emotions “True Love Never Dies” addresses altogether darker subject matter and was described by the duo as a “character song inspired by the ‘murder ballad’ tradition”. Written in the third person it charts the story of the murder by a young woman of her former lover, a neat contemporary twist on the form – “just a small flash of silver, and the screams could be heard through the night”. It’s the only other song from this album that was performed at Abergavenny.

“Love is a Game” was developed by the duo out of a lyric and a melodic fragment written by Jeffery. Another dark song, this time about a failed romantic relationship, it’s refrain “Love is a Game We Couldn’t Win” suggests that it is a distant cousin to Amy Winehouse’s “Love is a Losing Game”.

Purcell’s “Dido’s Lament”, the closing aria from his opera “Dido and Aeneas”, deals with more dark and disturbing subject matter and is sung by Jeffery with a profound sense of involvement, in a performance that also demonstrates the breadth of this technically gifted singer’s vocal range.

The album concludes with “Swan Song”, the last piece to be composed for the project and literally written on the evening before the recording session. It’s title was inspired by the swan depicted on the album cover, the photo-shoot having been completed prior to the recording date. Described by the duo as an “epic” it’s a shifting opus that passes through several different phases and embraces a variety of moods and styles, from power ballad to lament.

In its own, very different way this album represents as impressive a debut as “Home”. Both Gripper and Jeffery shine in the exposed setting of the piano / vocal duo. There is no additional instrumentation and no studio trickery, the songs and the performers are left to stand for themselves. It says much for the maturity of Jeffery and Gripper as both musicians and lyric writers that both do so very successfully. These are songs that convince both musically and lyrically, there is real musical and emotional intelligence at work here.

The musicians are well served by the engineering team of Luke Harney and Shawn Joseph who faithfully capture the nuances of both the singing and the playing. The only regret is that the lyrics are not reproduced as part of the album packaging.

The album is available here;
https://eddiegripper.bandcamp.com/album/elijah-jeffery-eddie-gripper

The duo are currently on tour with further dates as follows;

6th June, Kings Road Yard, Cardiff

11th June, Oxford University Jazz. Society

13th June, Burford Jazz Club, Oxfordshire

16th June, Bexley Jazz Club, London

18th June, Concorde Club, Eastleigh

22nd June, SMJC, Southampton

25th June,  Aberjazz, Fishguard

26th June, The Small Space, Barry

10th July, Hampstead Jaz Club, London

11th July, Cabaret, Cardiff

 

 

 

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