Clare Teal - Get Happy

When your new album comes packaged with loving quotes from the likes of Michael Parkinson, Jamie Cullum and Michael Buble, you know that you're not aiming for critical adulation. Clare Teal's Get Happy could hardly be any more 'Radio 2' if it had the station's logo plastered all over it, and the choices of material just screams 'safe', with a load of standards plus a few more 'contemporary' (ie, the 1970s rather than the 1920s) covers making up the bulk of the album. But Clare Teal is a jazz singer and this kind of material is what you'd expect from her, and no-one can deny that it is a relief to hear her get back to what she does best after last year's overly cosy and slick Paradisi Carousel. Perhaps the catalyst for this is her arrival on Universal's W14 imprint as Get Happy is a lot more 'old school', as well as some of the radio shows she herself has been doing where she has been showcasing her love of the oldies. She indulges herself in some Ella-style scat singing on Cheek To Cheek and there's a nice 20s/30s bounce to quite a few of the songs, so much so that it's almost disappointing that there's no audio crackle there too. Unfortunately, instead of going for this approach full-tilt, she holds back too often and lapses into cliched soft jazz mush. She clearly has a real love for what she does and that makes it fun when you can hear her having fun, and her every-woman appeal is obvious, but Get Happy isn't quite consistent enough to make you forget that Michael Buble likes her and it doesn't quite make you want to listen to it rather than the music it owes so much of a debt to.