Introducing... Melody Gardot

Published on Thursday 8 May 2008 17:32

HER sublime debut album suggests she is about to go the stratospheric way of Amy Winehouse, but Melody Gardot would never have arrived at this point in her life had she not been involved in a violent road accident.

When she was 19 and studying fashion at the Community College of Philadelphia, she was knocked off her bike by a car while cycling home and left bedbound for a year. Her head injuries wiped out her short-term memory.

Since Gardot had dabbled in music in the past, her doctor suggested she try music therapy as a means of recovery.

Specifically, he believed it would help her with her cognitive problems, as music has been known to help repair neural pathways in the brain after severe trauma.

It's unlikely, however, that her doctor could have imagined the far-reaching consequences. While still unable to walk, Gardot began writing and recording songs on a small portable multitrack recorder at her bedside.

"I started as a way to remember what I'd done; I had bad short-term memory problems," says the 23-year-old, who appears at The Voodoo Rooms on Sunday. "At the end of the day I couldn't remember the beginning."

She posted the songs on her MySpace page, and eventually an early demo tape reached the Universal record label, who signed the budding singer-songwriter and worked with her on her debut album, Worrisome Heart. Although Gardot admits she was never a fanatical music buff with a vast and esoteric record collection, she clearly knows how to get results with her own songs.

"I had ideas about how I wanted things to go," explains Gardot, whose performance on last week's Later... With Jools Holland show will have won her plenty of new admirers.

"In the studio cutting Worrisome Heart, I remember standing in the recording booth and saying to the horn guys, 'Can you make it sleazier?' They said 'Yeah! Sleazy man, that's cool!' It may not have been the most musical way to put it but they knew what I meant."

Clearly, she's doing something right, because critics seem to be having a little trouble defining her sound.

There have been the inevitable comparisons with the likes of Norah Jones and Diana Krall, and she was recently invited by Herbie Hancock to sing Joni Mitchell's song Edith And The Kingpin for the Live From Abbey Road TV series.

Equally though, her perform-ances might evoke echoes of Peggy Lee or even Tom Waits.

But what does she call her music? Is it jazz? Or is it blues?

"I can understand why people hear the blues in the songs," reflects the singer. "People talk about jazz, but if you strip it all down it just comes down to one thing – it's all about the songs and the place where they originate."

&#149 Melody Gardot, The Voodoo Rooms, West Register Street, Sunday, 8pm, 10, 0131-556 7060