Fay Claassen: ‘Melancholy is a great means of transport for emotions’

Live on stage, her crystal clear voice merging with the instruments, vocalist Fay Claassen is in her element. She has noticed how much performing means to her in corona time. “When it’s no longer allowed, you really realize what being on stage means to you.”

Of Fay Live, eight CDs and two LPs with previously unreleased live recordings, Fay Claassen marks the twenty-five years she has been in the jazz profession. In the recordings she jumps through time, varying from songs with big bands, performances in small ensembles with pianist Cor Bakker, and in collaborations with artists such as Toots Thielemans, Ivan Paduart or Vince Mendoza. From standards like ‘Love For Sale’, in which she never chooses the easiest way in voice improvisations, to the jazzing up of a pop song by Paul McCartney or Paul Simon.

Read also the interview with Claassen from 2017

In the silence of the pandemic, there was plenty of time to browse. Listening back to the dozens of recordings – she normally doesn’t have to think about it, she chuckles from Cologne. The Nijmegen-born singer is married to the German saxophonist and composer Paul Heller, who plays in the WDR Big Band, among others. He produced this album. “Listening back to old recordings, I am much too critical,” says Claassen. “In jazz I try to be so above the material and that is not possible at all in a live concert with uncertainties or irregularities. I trip over a silly typo. Or a solo that goes wrong. Don’t be so ‘nice’ I think if things don’t go well. The trick is to park your own rigor about what it should sound like for a while and listen from a certain distance – ha, with a glass of wine.”

Claassen debuted in 2000 with the album With A Song in My Heart: beautiful vocals, a somewhat worn recitation. She recalls that she could die a thousand deaths on stage, especially at that stage of her career. “It was a long fight to be allowed to stand by myself. I was not outgoing and preferred to stand with my back to the audience. It certainly wasn’t easy to casually and casually ‘have fun’ on stage. It depended on too much for that.”

‘Another Lifetime’, the composition is by Ivan Paduart, is one from the early days, from the album Live in Brussels (2003). “That evening Toots Thielemans came to participate in a number of pieces. Toots made music without any worries. He was great in modesty and he quietly listened to what the music needed. I found that very educational.”

Among the ten albums she subsequently made under her own name was the double CD Two Portraits of Chet Baker an outlier in 2006. She then vocalized a trumpet line as the opposite of the baritone sax, without really imitating solos by trumpeter Chet Baker. It led to her hit song ‘Almost Blue’. “An absolute Spotify hit, haha. Above a million streams, that’s nice for a jazz musician.” Partly, she knows, because it also sounds at funerals. “Amazing that it came from Elvis Costello, modern yet sounding like a standard. And Chet Baker sang it very beautifully. Melancholy is a great means of transport to convey emotions.”

A jump to her work with orchestras. Claassen is regularly invited as a guest soloist with the WDR Big Band. In the live concert in 2011 with the orchestra at the Bimhuis in Amsterdam, she sang with pianist and arranger Michael Abene. She calls singing with an orchestra “great”. “A dive into the deep with many ripples in the water. When you sing a line and there’s a response from the strings – wonderful. My absolute masterpiece is ‘Tea for Two’, in a heavy arrangement that varies from melody to harmony. This is top sport in music with fast improvisations.”

Looking back on this album, she sees that the preference for this kind of classical songs has evaporated among the young generation. “They prefer repetitive, layered improvisations now.” She has also been involved with pop and grooves for a while. But she will also be working on a theater program with director Ruut Weissman. With a Dutch song that will be released soon, ‘Painting of Love’, she heralds a ‘new era’. She wrote it for her father, who was an artist and now suffers from dementia. His guidance has been intense over the past ten years. It is striking that she no longer necessarily has to sing very nicely in it. “I sing it purely by feel. And I feel strongly that the painful situation may resound. Certainly in the pursuit of giving his free creative mind space.”

The ten-piece box Fay Live is out on Challenge Records.