Sylvie Noble / Ursula Harrison

“New Eve”

(Flaming Sword Records FSR0001)

Sylvie Noble – vocals, Ursula Harrison – double bass

Vocal and double bass duos are something of a rarity in the jazz world, perhaps the most famous example being that of the late, great American jazz vocalist Sheila Jordan (1928-2025), first with the Norwegian bassist Arild Andersen and later with the American Harvie Swartz.

Closer to home singer Zoe Gilby and her husband Andy Champion perform in the same format and have recorded an EP simply titled “Voice & Bass”. Their repertoire includes a stunning version of the Nick Drake song “River Man”.

Other than these two examples I can’t readily call to mind any other voice and bass duos, which makes the combination of bassist Ursula Harrison, the 2024 BBC Young Jazz Musician of the Year and vocalist Sylvie Noble all the more intriguing, and particularly so as the duo place the focus very firmly on their own original material.

Both come from a distinguished jazz lineage. Harrison is the daughter of bassist, multi-instrumentalist, composer and educator Paula Gardiner and Noble’s father is the distinguished  pianist, composer and improviser Liam Noble. Both Paula and Liam have featured extensively on the Jazzmann web pages over the years – now it’s the turn of the next generation. 

The Jazzmann has been championing the work of the Sylvie + Ursula duo for some time and has reviewed their performances at a club night at Black Mountain Jazz in Abergavenny, and at Brecon Jazz Festival, both in the summer of 2025.  The second of those performances, although very similar,  was just as magical and compelling as the first. This is a musical partnership that really is something special.

The duo have also been covered by the national jazz press with Noble and Harrison having been recently interviewed by Jazzwise magazine. The album has also been favourably reviewed by the same publication. Both articles appear in the June 2026 edition.

Ursula Harrison made her recording debut as far back as 2008.  When still a child she played recorder on one of the tracks on her mother’s “Hot Lament” album, released by Edition Records. Since then she’s studied both mathematics and music at Cardiff University, where her music tutors included bassist Yuri Goloubev and pianist Huw Warren. She’s also part of the European Jazz Master’s Programme, variously studying in Amsterdam, Berlin and Trondheim. She has also studied in Newfoundland, Canada.

As a performer Harrison has played with the National Youth Jazz Orchestra (NYJO), the JM World Jazz Orchestra and the Amsterdam based CvA Jazz Collective. Her small group credits include work with Warren, guitarist Ant Law, violinist / vocalist Angharad Jenkins and pianists Rachel Starritt, Nils Kavanagh and Geoff Eales.

Her most notable sidewoman appearances have been with pianist and composer Eddie Gripper. She appears on Gripper’s acclaimed debut album “Home” (2023) and subsequently toured extensively with his trio.

Harrison’s regular groups include her duo with Noble and the sextet Orbit Street, which blends indie folk with jazz and which features Harrison on both bass and lead vocals. That group also includes saxophonist Blyth Bennett, guitarist Dan Edgecombe, keyboard player Charlie Herbert and twin drummers Sam Green and Patrick Barrett-Donlon, the last named also a member of the Eddie Gripper Trio.

At the 2024 Brecon Jazz Festival Harrison led her own one off quartet featuring mum Paula Gardiner on guitar, plus saxophonist Coren Sithers and drummer Liz Exell. The 2025 Festival featured Double Double, a trio featuring the twin basses of Harrison and Gardiner with Exell at the drums. Both of these performances are reviewed as part of my Festival coverage for the relevant years. The 2026 Brecon Jazz Festival, which will take place in August, will see Harrison present her “Songs ‘Bout Birds” project, a quartet collaboration with a group of Norwegian musicians that she met during her time studying in Trondheim.

Sylvie Noble graduated from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama (RWCMD) in Cardiff in 2024 and Youtube footage of her final recital can be enjoyed at;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glvmImQnsQA
The recital footage features her leading a quintet that includes Harrison on bass, saxophonist Emma Craig, drummer Bailey Love and rising star pianist Nils Kavanagh.

There’s also earlier footage from the RWCMD’s 2020 Amser Jazz Time Festival, a standards based set from a group featuring Noble plus pianist Charlie Herbert, guitarist Samuel Knight, bassist Marcus Baber and drummer Tom Williams.
https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=sylvie+noble+vocals&mid=55537ED66C075D40EC4455537ED66C075D40EC44&FORM=VIRE

I have also seen Noble sing live with the ensembles Funkyard and Mingus Project at different editions of Brecon Jazz Festival. She also appears on Mingus Project’s live album release.

More recently Noble has been heading a regular Next Generation Jazz! residency at London’s Jazz Cafe POSK in the company of Harrison and Kavanagh plus alto saxophonist Elliot Wong and drummer Bailey Love. The series has presented homages to three of Noble’s jazz and singer / songwriter heroines, Betty Carter, Joni Mitchell and Carla Bley, all of whom are influences on the Sylvie + Ursula duo sound.

The duo with Harrison would appear to be Noble’s primary creative outlet at this time. Although both met in Cardiff they studied at different institutions in the Welsh capital and first met at a summer school at which both Paula Gardiner and Liam Noble were teaching. They subsequently began to work together in various Cardiff based bands, including the folk / country / bluegrass A Wheel Inside A Wheel an experience which influenced them as songwriters.

Now based in London Noble is pursuing a post graduate course in jazz studies at the Royal Academy of Music. She also teaches at various summer schools in the UK and Ireland and has written for the UK Jazz News website.

She is a member of the London Vocal Project and during her time in Cardiff was commissioned by the Wales Millennium Centre to reimagine the repertoire of the iconic Welsh post-punk band Young Marble Giants within a jazz context,.

Both Harrison and Noble are frequent award winners. Harrison was the winner BBC Young Jazz Musician of the Year in 2024 while Noble was a finalist in the 2025 Tina May Young Jazz Musician competition

The album takes its title from Noble’s original song “New Eve”, which in turn draws inspiration from the Angela Carter novel “The Passion of New Eve”, first published in 1977. In their album liner notes the duo say of the recording;
“‘New Eve’, our own creation story, has surprised us at every turn. The album has lived up to its name as we have experienced many of our own rebirths in our relationship to the music and in our playing of it. We connected as a duo through our exploration of play, curiosity and humour, yet reflecting on this music has brought our attention to its darkness. We welcome these moments of paralysing stillness, and we hope you do too.”

Meanwhile their Bandcamp page summarises the recording thus;
“seamlessly weaves between tales of disorder and defiance, grief and rebirth, through an intimate acoustic conversation between the voice and double bass. Combining raucous improvisation, deep grooves, and humorous interplay, New Eve provides a stripped down and deeply nostalgic glimpse into the human condition”.

The pared down duo format ensures that the recorded versions of the songs of Harrison and Noble sound very similar to the live renditions that I have enjoyed so much. Recorded and mixed by Owain Fleetwood Jenkins at his StudiOwz in Pembrokeshire the album eschews overdubbing and special effects and was apparently recorded with just two microphones, thus ensuring that the acoustic intimacy of the duo’s live recordings also finds expression on record.

In addition to her work as a jazz bassist Harrison also has aspirations to make a career as a singer – songwriter, and it would appear that Noble is also moving in a similar direction.
“I think it’s maybe just the way we’re going in general in society, like it’s not so fashionable to do just one thing any more.” Harrison told Victoria Kingham in a 2025 interview for Jazzwise magazine.

In addition to their jazz influences Noble and Harrison also acknowledge the influence of American singer songwriters such as Gillian Welch and Robin Holcomb, artists more commonly associate with folk and country music, but also with jazz connections of their own. Welch’s songs “Dark Turn of Mind” and “My First Lover” have both featured in the duo’s live sets.

The album commences with the Harrison original “Country Song”, the title an allusion to the folk / country band that Harrison and Noble used to play in. A strummed bass intro leads into a song whose introspective, self aware lyrics address themes that include both philosophy and human relationships. Harrison’s bass shadows Noble’s vocals brilliantly and the song also includes an ebullient, virtuosic scat vocal / double bass episode before the duo return to the lyrics. This is music that is both serious and humorous, criss crossing the boundaries during the course of a single song.

Also by Harrison “Who Knew I’d Miss The Rainfall”,  is a bittersweet song with an evocative and poetic lyric, again addressing the complex machinations of human relationships. Noble’s voice conveys deep emotions without resorting to histrionics while Harrison’s bass playing is technically accomplished but never unnecessarily ‘showy’. Both musicians deploy their ‘chops’ tastefully and in the service of the  music but that doesn’t mean that they’re lacking in terms of adventure either. Their compositions and arrangements are often audacious and improvisation remains an essential part of their creative process.

Harrison has revealed that she often writes at the piano, the next song “Distant Haze” being a case in point. The lyrics are written in both the first and third person and include the refrain “sometimes I just let it happen, I’m tired of facing new distractions”.  Harrison brings a lot of herself to her lyrics, but her words retain that all important sense of mystery.

Noble makes her songwriting debut with the title track, the Angela Carter inspired “New Eve”, the lyrics seemingly an expression of feminine rebirth – “New skin, new soul, new Eve”. The performance also includes an adventurous scat vocal episode, a reminder that Noble numbers Betty Carter and Norma Winstone among her jazz vocal heroines.

The brief but lively “Dance” features more exceptional wordless vocalising, with Noble’s joyful scatting mirrored by Harrison’s nimble bass plucking on a piece that acts as a kind of musical ‘palate cleanser”.

One of the few songs from the album that I’ve not seen performed live, the dark unsettling “Nameless Folk”, with its theme of bereavement, represents one of the few occasions where the players venture into the range of extended vocal and instrumental techniques.

Harrison’s song “Arizona” features words added to a melody that she had written some six months earlier.  The evocative and bitter sweet lyrics that tap into Harrison’s love of folk and Americana, but the music still has a jazz sensibility. Noble’s well enunciated vocals invest the words with genuine emotion.

A passage of unaccompanied bass introduces “Days Go By”, an evocative chronicle of a relationship that cleverly sees the lyrics of one line bleeding into the next.

It’s Noble who flies solo on the acapella vocal intro to the closing “I Was Alone”, the wistful purity of her vocals contrasting effectively with the deep resonances of Harrison’s double bass.

Mixing jazz and singer-songwriter sensibilities and influences in equal measure “New Eve” represents an astonishingly mature debut from these two young women. There’s a genuinely poetic quality to the lyrics, which are simultaneously both highly personal and tantalisingly oblique. The singing and playing is of an exceptionally high standard throughout, but is crucially deployed in the service of the songs rather than in any grandstanding displays of technique.

As an album “New Eve” is highly recommended, but as somebody who has enjoyed seeing the duo perform live twice it’s in the concert environment that their magical musical chemistry is best appreciated. The album makes for wonderful listening, but do try to catch them live if you possibly can.

The “New Eve” album is available here;
https://sylvieursula.bandcamp.com/album/new-eve

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