Indie-jazz duo The Bird and the Bee are what you get when you cross a jazz pianist and a distinctively voiced rock star's daughter. They talk to Brian Boyd.
Indie-jazz may not be a widely recognised musical genre, but if new Los Angeles duo The Bird and the Bee have anything to do with it, it will be soon. Vocalist Inara George and multi-instrumentalist Greg Kurstin describe their unique sounds in terms of "a futuristic 1960s American film in Brazil", which isn't very helpful given that it could mean anything, but if you think of Saint Etienne crossed with Mazzy Star crossed with the famous Blue Note jazz label, you will be getting somewhere close to capturing their sound. Their eponymous debut album was released to much acclaim earlier this year in the US, while in Europe, where it has just been released, the reviews have been equally glowing.
Both George and Kurstin carry musical baggage. The former is the daughter of the late Lowell George of the famous Californian jam-band Little Feat. The latter is a jazz pianist prodigy who has gone on to work with Beck, The Flaming Lips and Lily Allen.
The pair first met up when Kurstin was drafted in to play keyboards on George's solo album, All Rise, released last year.
"We just seemed to click musically," says George. "We both used to stay behind after the sessions for the album were finished and he'd be playing jazz standards on the piano and I'd be singing along to them. We both just had such a blast doing this that when we ran out of jazz standards to cover, we sat down and decided that we had something going on musically between us, so we began to write our own original material."
The very first song they wrote, the album highlight, Again and Again, was to prove a template of sorts for their later work. The song was a breezy jazz workout with a bossa nova undertow that allowed George's distinctive vocals to float all over the song. Garnering huge amounts of radio airplay both here and in the US, the infectious Again and Againwas proof positive for the duo that this new project was to take precedence over both their solo careers.
"That first song demonstrated that we both had the same vision of the sort of music we were going to do," says George. "Although nominally I write all the vocal parts and Greg writes all the instrumental parts, in practice we overlap an awful lot. My vocals might suggest a different piano direction to him, and something he is doing might make me modify what I am doing with the lyrics. We just don't have any inhibitions about taking the music to a totally different place from where it started."
ALTHOUGH GEORGE COMESacross as a very likable and extremely polite presence, you would get a different idea of her from just listening to the album. On the song, I Hate Camera, she rails against a publicity machine that would have her drape herself in front of photographers at the drop of a hat, while on F***ing Boyfriend, the f-word gets more than a few outings.
"People do expect me to be really tough when they meet me, because of the lyrics," says George. "But honestly, I'm not like that at all. Maybe I just get all that side out of me with the lyrics. I have heard myself being described as a feminist, which I find kind of strange. I wouldn't say I'm overtly feminist but I think all woman of my generation [late twenties] have a feminist element to them. It's inbuilt."
With her father's musical connections, the young George grew up around people such as Jackson Browne (who once wrote a song about her), Randy Newman and Linda Ronstadt. She's still close to Jackson Browne and he contributed backing vocals to her solo album last year.
"I may have grown up in a rock'n'roll way, but I never really knew my father - he died [in 1979] when I was very young," she says. "I do have small memories of him though. I'm into a totally different type of music than he was into, so there's no Little Feat sound at all in my music. Some of the Little Feat fans come to my gigs and they're always really nice to me. I do get asked to play their songs sometimes but I just have to apologise and tell people I don't know how to play them."
ALTHOUGH GREG KURSTINdidn't have a rock'n'roll father, he was always surrounded by music, and even as a child was a very accomplished pianist. In his late teens he moved to New York to study with the noted jazz pianist Jaki Byard, who used to play in Charles Mingus's band. "I am a jazz musician first and foremost but I've always had rock leanings," he says.
"When I wasn't studying the piano, I was playing in rock bands and in a weird way I was always attracted to music where the musicians were not necessarily super proficient - Kraftwerk, Velvet Underground, Iggy Pop.
Working with people such as Beck, Flaming Lips and Lily Allen has shown me that you can bring a certain jazz sensibility to other styles of music. It's not that I've left the jazz world entirely behind, it's just that I'm happy drifting between it and the rock world".
Kurstin had long wanted to be in a musical duo with a female vocalist and knew George was the perfect musical partner when they first met up. "We seem to get each other, we don't have to explain ourselves musically to each other," he says. "What I'm always looking for is someone who is open to new ideas. When I was working with Lily Allen on her Alright, Still album, I used to bring in different music and play it to her and we ended up moving in a different direction because of that. It's the same with Inara, except now I'm not just a contributor, I'm half of the band. And we're really happy now with the sound we found on the album. Having said that, the new songs we're currently working are similar, but different".
"Some of the new songs sound like they could be in a Broadway musical," says George. "Maybe the next album will be an indie-jazz-Broadway musical affair."
The Bird and the Bee is on EMI.