Joanna Eden / Andres Lafone Duo, Brecon Jazz Club, The Muse Arts Centre, Brecon, 13/05/2025

Joanna Eden – piano, lead vocals, Andres Lafone – double bass, electric bass, backing vocals

Brecon Jazz Club’s May event featured an intimate duo performance featuring the Hampshire based pianist, vocalist and songwriter Joanna Eden and her Uruguayan born husband, bassist and vocalist Andres Lafone.

Eden had previously visited Brecon for a charity concert at Brecon Jazz Festival raising money for the charity Side by Side by Refugees, a series of annual charity events organised with the assistance of regular volunteer steward John Anderson. Other artists to have performed in this series include Liane Carroll and Ian Shaw. The return of Eden was very much a case of ‘back by public demand’, something reflected in the size of the sizeable audience turnout on a glorious early summer evening.

The prolific Eden has released a total of six albums featuring mainly original material, “A Little Bird Told Me” (1999), “My Open Eye” (2005), “Falling Out Of Grace” (2012) “Truth Tree” (2018), “Love Quiet” (2021), and her latest offering “The Road to Paysandu” (2024). Her regular quartet, as featured on her latest album, features Lafone on bass, the Uruguayan born Guillermo Hill on guitar and George Double on drums.

She has appeared at many leading jazz venues including Ronnie Scott’s, Pizza Express Jazz Club and The Stables, Wavendon and her band has supported a variety of leading jazz and pop artists including Van Morrison, Tom Jones, Jamie Cullum, Roy Hargrove and The Buena Vista Social Club.

Eden is also an acclaimed educator and includes pop star Sam Smith among her former students. Indeed today’s event was followed by a vocal workshop led by Eden that took place at Brecon’s recently refurbished Castle Hotel the next day.

Lafone first came to the UK to study at The Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. Since settling in the UK he has become a prominent presence on the British jazz and Latin music scene and also a prolific session musician, appearing on more than fifty recordings. Among those with whom he has performed are Jon Cleary, Matt Bianco, Mike Lindup and Snowboy.

Tonight’s programme featured a mix of Eden originals, jazz standards, pop tunes and a couple of songs by Joni Mitchell, Eden’s songwriting heroine.

The duo eased themselves in with a version of one of Eden’s favourite jazz standards, “I Should Care”, with Lafone imparting that all important sense of swing from the double bass. Eden’s singing displayed a real talent for jazz phrasing and incorporated a scat vocal episode. A confident start that got the audience on side straight away.

Eden was battling against the effects of a cold, but this added an appealing extra huskiness to her voice on the sensuous original song “Beautiful Inside”.
This segued into the faster paced “A Little Bird Told Me”, a piece that featured her as both vocalist and instrumental soloist, supported by Lafone’s walking bass lines.

Joni Mitchell was a fairly late discovery for the classically trained Eden but has since become a firm favourite and a significant songwriting influence. “The Road to Paysandu” features an Eden arrangement of “Blue”, the title track of Mitchell’s seminal 1971 album. Displaying a great affinity for Mitchell’s lyrics Eden put her own stamp on the song, while remaining true to Mitchell’s spirit.

Lafone moved to electric bass for a second Mitchell cover, “Big Yellow Taxi”, a song that I believe represents Mitchell’s only UK hit single. The environmental concerns of the lyrics now seem even more pertinent than ever and were given voice here in Eden’s highly effective jazz style arrangement.

Mitchell’s work may also have an inspiration for Eden’s own “By Design”, the opening track on the “The Road to Paysandu” album. Written during a trip to Bologna the autobiographical lyrics address the subject of female jealousy.

There was a return to the jazz canon with an Ella Fitzgerald inspired version of Dizzy Gillespie’s “A Night in Tunisia”. Eden described the piece as being “technically demanding” and her singing combined Jon Hendricks’ vocalese lyrics with wordless scat vocal episodes. Lafone was featured as an instrumental soloist on his five string electric bass.

Also from the jazz standards repertoire came an arrangement of “Nature Boy”, a song written by proto-hippy eden ahbez and famously recorded by Nat King Cole.  Before performing the song Eden told us a number of interesting facts about the mysterious ahbez. The performance itself incorporated an unaccompanied piano intro from Eden and also featured Lafone’s backing vocals.

A lengthy first set concluded with “Love’s Children”, a song from Eden’s “Love Quiet” album. It’s a song dedicated to Eden’s neighbours, hippy like characters, perhaps inspired by the example of eden ahbez. The lyrics speak of child like people who “never get bored” or lose their sense of fun and continue to marvel at the wonders of the world world. I was reminded of the famous passage in Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road” about his love for the “mad people” who “never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles”.

The Eden / Lafone duo had certainly lit up Brecon in much the same way during the course of an intriguing and well programmed first half.

The second set began where the first had left off with a visit to the “Love Quiet” repertoire. “Firefly” began life as a tune by Lafone to which Eden later added lyrics. Introduced by a passage of unaccompanied electric bass this was very much a team effort with Lafone’s bass continuing to drive the song as Eden delivered the wistful lyrics.

From the same album “Smiling” was another co-write, a song celebrating the couples’ love for one another. Lafone’s mobile electric bass lines were again a conspicuous component alongside Eden’s voice and piano.

The late Stephen Sondheim is another of Eden’s songwriting heroes and his “Send in the Clowns” is a song that the young Eden first performed at the age of seven or eight. The adult Eden has written a new arrangement of the song, giving it a minor key, modal jazz treatment that proved to be extremely effective – for me vast improvement on the more familiar Elaine Paige version. It brought out the dark theatricality of the lyrics and I could imagine one of my own songwriting heroes, Peter Hammill, interpreting it in this type of arrangement.

Next another cover version, an arrangement of the Bonnie Raitt song “Nick of Time”, a piece that Eden recorded for the “Love Quiet” album. This perceptive song about the ageing process was given a jazz twist and featured Lafone on electric bass and backing vocals.

In 2007 Eden released “Moving Shadows”, an album comprised entirely of covers recorded by the trio of Eden, bassist Julie Walkington and drummer Charlie Price. From this recording came an arrangement of “The Midnight Sun”, a tune written by Lionel Hampton to which Johnny Mercer added the lyrics. Eden is a great admirer of Mercer’s abilities as a lyricist and her interpretation of the song draws inspiration from the version recorded by Ella Fitzgerald. This was a piece that also featured Eden as a piano soloist.

A fist visit to South America came with a trip to Brazil and the Antonio Carlos Jobim song “Corcovado”. Played in the bossa nova style Eden’s interpretation was inspired by the recorded version by Astrud Gilberto and included an instrumental feature for Lafone on electric bass.

The song “A Taste of Honey”, written by Bobby Scott and Ric Marlowe, appeared on the first Beatles album “Please Please Me” but was given more of a bitter-sweet feel by Eden, who likened it to a folk tune. It was also a piece that featured her as an instrumental soloist.

The set concluded with two songs paying tribute to Lafone’s Uruguayan origins.. First we heard “Amandote”, a popular song by the Uruguayan artist Jaime Roos. This featured Lafone on electric bass and backing vocals with Eden singing the lyrics in Spanish and subsequently declaring “a great song is a great song in any language”.

The title of Eden’s latest album is derived from the name of Lafone’s home city and from the numerous road trips the couple have undertaken in Uruguay. From this album the song “Just About Holding On”, an Eden / Lafone co-write combines autobiographical lyrics tracing one of those road trips with a look at Uruguayan history as Eden compares and contrasts the couples’ experiences with those of the pioneering immigrants who settled in what became modern day Uruguay. This featured a combination of English and Spanish lyrics, with Lafone taking the vocal lead on the Spanish language sections.

In view of Eden’s cold and the fact that she had to lead a vocal workshop the following morning the couple declined the requests for an encore, but nobody could feel short changed by two lengthy sets that presented a wide range of fascinating songs sourced from a broad range of musical traditions but all given a very tasty and enjoyable jazz flavour.

I was very impressed with the quality of Eden’s singing and playing and more importantly by her writing. The original songs, several of them co-written with Lafone were intelligent, evocative and of a high quality and compared well with the other material on offer.

My thanks to Joanna and Andres for speaking with me at length after the show and for providing me with a review copy of “The Road to Paysandu”, which I intend to take a fuller look at in due course. From what I’ve heard thus far it represents her best and most original recording to date.

The decision to invite Joanne Eden back to Brecon represented a triumph for Brecon Jazz Club and this was a performance that was very warmly received by the audience, who were also charmed by Eden’s outgoing personality and her engaging frankness. As a listener who is not always totally enamoured of vocal jazz I was pleasantly surprised at just how much how I enjoyed this evening’s performance.

 

 

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