There is something wonderfully appropriate about Rachael Calladine launching an album called Soho Elegy at Crazy Coqs, buried beneath the bustle of London’s West End and only a short walk from the clubs and rooms that helped shape her musical life.
Because this is more than an album with Soho in its title. Soho Elegy feels like a record about memory: about places, people, late nights, mistakes, relationships and that peculiar mixture of glamour and loneliness that has always existed around the edges of Soho after dark.
Calladine knows that world.
Her career stretches back more than three decades, through the London jazz circuit and performances at Ronnie Scott’s and the 606 Club, a spell touring with jazz/hip-hop outfit Us3, session work and eventually a decade living and performing in Dubai. Returning to Britain ultimately brought another, rather unexpected chapter when the pandemic stopped live music and she retrained as an Emergency Medical Technician and blue-light ambulance response driver in Lincolnshire.
That life lived matters on Soho Elegy.
Last year’s The Game re-established Calladine as a formidable jazz singer, but this feels like the more personal record. Rather than building an album around familiar standards, Calladine has surrounded herself with songs written by long-standing musical collaborators Adrian York and Pat McCarthy, alongside two compositions of her own. The result is unmistakably jazz, but jazz with its doors left open to soul, blues and classic popular songwriting.
And importantly, it doesn’t feel like an exercise in nostalgia.
The opening Walk of Shame immediately sets the mood. James McMillan’s muted trumpet hangs beautifully around the arrangement while Calladine introduces us to the less glamorous side of the night before: that early-morning Soho where bravado has disappeared and vulnerability has taken its place.
It is an inspired starting point because Soho Elegy repeatedly plays with that contrast — sophistication and sadness, wit and regret, a crowded room and the possibility of still feeling completely alone.
Calladine’s voice is particularly suited to it. There is warmth there, certainly, but increasingly there is something else: the confidence not to oversell a lyric. She allows words room to land.
The title track takes us deeper into the Soho she knew during the 1990s, while The Golden Hour reaches far beyond the West End. Inspired by Calladine’s experience as an Emergency Medical Technician, it connects the critical first hour following trauma with the altogether more personal process of knowing when something — or someone — has to be let go.
It could easily have become overly sentimental. It doesn’t.
Elsewhere the mood lightens. Fashionista has a knowing playfulness, while the jazz waltz Falling is one of those moments when everything seems to settle naturally into place. Calladine’s beautifully controlled vocal sits comfortably inside the rhythm rather than riding on top of it, the band responding with the instinctive ease of musicians who clearly know one another extremely well.
And what a band she has assembled.
Pat McCarthy’s guitar is consistently tasteful, Andy Tytherleigh and Si Potts provide a rhythm section capable of moving effortlessly from swing into something altogether more soulful, while Adrian York’s piano and keyboards are central to the album’s character. McMillan’s trumpet appearances provide another colour without ever overcrowding what is, throughout, an exceptionally well-judged recording.
Claire Martin OBE and James McMillan deserve considerable credit here too. Recorded at quietmoneymusic over four days in March, the production has intimacy and space. Nothing is fighting to be heard. It sounds like musicians playing together rather than an album assembled around a singer.
One of the real highlights is Gone Too Long. There is something almost hymn-like about it, Calladine delivering the melody with a restraint that makes it all the more affecting. It is a reminder that great vocal jazz isn’t about demonstrating what a voice can do; sometimes it is about knowing precisely what not to do.
That perhaps gets to the heart of Calladine as a singer.
Her influences and experience are evident, but she doesn’t sound as though she is trying to be anyone else. There are moments that evoke the great jazz singers, others that drift towards classic singer-songwriter territory and still others that wouldn’t sound remotely out of place in a sophisticated soul set.
It all belongs to the same voice.
By the time No More closes the album, a song written almost twenty years ago but only now receiving its first recording, Soho Elegy has travelled some distance. What begins among the shadows of Soho eventually arrives somewhere altogether more hopeful.
And perhaps that is why the title is so clever.
An elegy traditionally mourns something lost, but this isn’t really an album mourning the past. Calladine appears far more interested in what remains after it. The experiences, relationships and music of those Soho years have travelled with her through Us3, Dubai, ambulance shifts and eventually back into the jazz clubs of Britain.
Last year’s The Game announced that Rachael Calladine was back.
Soho Elegy tells us rather more importantly who came back.
Richly melodic, beautifully played and refreshingly unconcerned with proving how clever it is, this is sophisticated vocal jazz with soul, wit and a considerable amount of life tucked between the notes.
And for an album born from memories of Soho, there really could be only one way to finish.
One more for the road. Glenn Wright
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