When I first met the singer and actor Jacqui Dankworth on a story for Jazz UK magazine in 2004, I have a suspicion I’d already mentally sketched the arc of a moving tale about a quietly eloquent performer searching for her artistic independence – because she also happened to be the daughter of Grammy-winning vocalist Dame Cleo Laine and saxophonist/bandleader Sir John Dankworth, then the most famous vocal/instrumental jazz marriage in the world. A public stage might feel like a natural destination for children with star performers for parents, I pondered – but might they eventually hit trouble finding one of their own?
As we talked that day, that theory soon hit the deck. For at least a decade before our 2004 meeting, Jacqui Dankworth had been recognised by alert witnesses as a versatile stage actor in both dramas and musicals, and as a hip singer with a wide range at ease in all manner of virtuosic genre-bending bands too. Her Field of Blue group with multi-instrumentalist and singer Harvey Brough in the mid-1990s was a groundbreaker for its balance of classical elegance with phrasing from jazz, rock, folk and Latin music.
Her releases from the millennium onward also showed how securely inventive she was with the standard-song materials her mother had so majestically embraced, but songs by Dylan, Joni Mitchell or Stevie Wonder would be on the tracklists too. Jacqui Dankworth has now released six very different albums across a quarter-century as a leader with this month’s latest, Windmills, being the most ambitious – a collection of classics by composers including Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein, Michel Legrand and Sérgio Mendes, supported by her regular quartet of her husband Charlie Wood (piano, arrangements), Oli Hayhurst (bass) and Ralph Salmins (drums), plus the prizewinning and adventurous Carducci String Quartet, a classical string section steered by Britten Sinfonia leader Jacqueline Shave, and the unblinkingly quickwitted BBC Big Band, which entered the recording proceedings for one three-hour visit and nailed Wood’s complex arrangements on the spot, with dazzling horn-improv solos thrown in.
With ‘Windmills Of Your Mind’, ‘Send In The Clowns’, ‘Baubles, Bangles and Beads’ and ‘If You Go Away’ on the programme, it’s hard not to start our 2025 telephone conversation with reflections on the legacies of the composers who crafted them, and powerful remakes of their work by great interpreters.
‘Many years ago, my mum wrote me a beautiful letter, when I was feeling unsure about what I could ever add to great songs that had already been performed by artists like Sarah Vaughan or Sinatra’, Dankworth recalls. ‘I was probably in my 30s or early 40s, and she was reminding me “these songs have been done by everybody, but you shouldn’t be intimidated by that. They’re out there in the world for everyone, so everyone has a right to sing them in their own ways”.
The singer’s last solo release was Live To Love (Specific Jazz, 2013), a collection of originals and tributes to contemporary composers as different as Donny Hathaway and Wayne Shorter. That album’s successor has been a long time coming. So where did the trigger for Windmills come from?
‘Well, Charlie and I do a lot of live work and I’ve returned to acting quite a bit in recent years too, so there hasn’t been all that much time,’ Dankworth says. ‘But last year, he and I had a chat about the possibility of a record, and he reminded me we do have all these great songs from our live sets, and of course he’s done a lot of arrangements for them with different ensembles too. So Windmills was done the opposite way round to the way people usually make an album I guess. The usual method is that artists work up new material for a recording, and then take it out on the road when it’s made. With us, those songs and arrangements had been with us for years before we decided to record’.
Did she have a pervading sense of an overall sound for the set?
‘I was sure I wanted to do something lush, you know,’ Dankworth quickly replies. ‘Not just a trio record. I also tend not to choose songs that I don’t have a personal connection with, I like to do things that have for some reason meant something special to me. So those things influenced the instrumentation we used, and the repertoire.’
We ponder on some gripping twists to the set’s interpretations, which come from Charlie Wood’s wide experiences as both a vocalist and an open-minded pianist experienced in blues, swing and bebop bands, and from Dankworth’s own distinctively flexible voice – with a range sweeping from a rich contralto reminiscent of her mother’s deep tones to delicately flute-like upper sounds, and phrasing as agile as that of the jazz instrumentalists she heard so often at first hand around the family home in her youth. The much-covered ‘Windmills of Your Mind’ distinctively turns on Wood’s choice of a Spanish setting, while an unsettlingly eloquent account of ‘If You Go Away’ has both a wistful and a dark side, and the phlegmatic ironies of ‘Send In The Clowns’, enveloped by the lustrous harmonies of the Carducci Quartet, have rarely been so powerfully yet unostentatiously unveiled.
‘It’s been great to explore so many different approaches to a lot of music that’s been so familiar to me on this album,’ Jacqui Dankworth says. ‘And as I was saying about the way our working lives shaped the record, rather than the other way around, some of the approaches we took were almost accidental, or had come from different experiences we’d had. I had worked on a version of “Windmills of Your Mind” with Ireland’s RTÉ Orchestra, but I also remembered my brother Alec’s and my nannies dressing us up as flamenco dancers as children, and somehow that all came together in Charlie’s Spanish setting for this version. I was very struck by Phillip Glass’s music on ‘Koyaanisqatsi’, which influenced the cyclical vibe we gave to ‘If You Go Away’ in the way it moves from a painful emotion to something that’s slightly more obsessive. I knew Sinatra’s version of ‘Baubles, Bangles and Beads’ where he does a gently Latin thing on it, and I don’t know if Charlie picked up on that but he certainly makes a stunning big band arrangement with it. “Some Other Time” and “Lucky to be Me” date back to a Leonard Bernstein evening arranged by the Jewish Music Institute (JMI), when I was asked to sing a couple of Bernstein songs for it, and mentioned that I’d been working with the Carducci String Quartet – so it then became a JMI commission for all of us, piano, string quartet and voice. So that’s how those pieces found their way on to the album.’
Her husband Charlie Wood’s history adds another creatively unruly backstory to Jacqui Dankworth’s musical evolution and the input to Windmills. Born at the heart of blues and r&b in Memphis, Tennessee, he was on the road as a keyboard player and Hammond organist with blues guitar legend Albert King in his early 20s, and won a dedicated ‘Charlie Wood Day’ tribute from his hometown’s city council for the longstanding residency he ran at King’s Palace on the city’s Beale Street, jamming with legends including BB King and Alvin Batiste. Those experiences of inventing arrangements on the fly around unfamiliar partners nurtured a skill that Jacqui Dankworth is well equipped to recognise.
‘I think Charlie’s arrangements are so good because he’s a singer, and of course singers crucially depend on arrangers,’ Dankworth says, and she has plenty of family authority, notably her mother’s involvement with her father’s orchestras, to endorse that proposition. ‘But he’s also a brilliant all-round musician, and though he’s often considered a blues player, he’s very versatile. He also hears things that other people don’t. “Send In The Clowns” has been done so many times, it’s hard to come up with a new arrangement. But because Charlie’s not from the world that has usually arranged songs like that, he wasn’t intimidated by its history.’
Before we parted, I enquired about Jacqui Dankworth’s lifelong involvement with acting (a pursuit that, alongside classical flute-playing, occupied a lot of her time as a child, and subsequently as a performer) and whether that art’s performance connections with music might have had a particular resonance for her? The thought led back to the magnificent Cleo Laine, 97 and retired from the stage now, but still a fount of wisdom in her gifted daughter’s mind.
‘I used to say to mum, don’t you ever get sick of singing one song over and over?’ Jacqui reflects. ‘And she would say, absolutely not, every time she approached it, it was like the first time. That’s important. Like acting. In the run of a show, you have to experience that material afresh night after night as if you didn’t know it. Same with songs, little masterpiece stories with a beginning and middle and end. I got to see Sinatra perform once, my mum was on the bill with him at the Albert Hall. You could feel the connection between acting and singing then. Of course he was a legend, so everyone was on his side, but it wasn’t just because he had this incredible voice, but because he was recreating these great songs from his own life experiences. I’m not really an improvising jazz singer, but I’ve got a jazz sound and I feel the music. I want to keep remaking these songs my own way.’
Jacqui Dankworth’s Windmills is out on 2 May, tours the UK from 19 April.
