Interview with Georgia Mancio: The new Stacey Kent with a Latin twist

Being told for ten years you have a voice of honeyed purity would put some colour in anyone's cheeks. But jazz singer Georgia Mancio has good reason to look radiant: a fourth season of her own ReVoice vocal jazz festival successfully concluded, or two appearances in stellar company coming up at the London Jazz Festival and her fourth album, Come Rain or Come Shine, just out. We discuss the new jazz standards, her broadening international repertoire, and the intensely trusting nature of artistic collaboration. 

Delicate but chocolate-rich vocals are all very well, yet you need resilience as well as a beautiful voice, to make it as a jazz singer.  On Silhouette, her 2010 studio album, the vocals had a bleaker, even sinister edge, especially in the tracks Finisterre and Question the Answer, suggesting the toughness needed to battle to success in an often unsupportive market for live jazz.      

She’s always enjoyed singing standards (the staple repertoire of jazz singing by composers like Cole Porter, or Rodgers and Hart) and the freshness of her tone brings the sound bang up to date, inviting a new audience to escape the cliches of matrons with a vibrato like the big dipper swaggering through a smoky cabaret. She’s passionate that these songs still have the power to move, as long as they are sung with honesty: 'The main criteria for me are: do I really like it, can I sing it, can I present it honestly? I love standards, I don’t have an issue with the age of the song,' she says. 

At the same time, Mancio has been extending the range of her repertoire. For someone with a smooth and supple voice, Tom Waits seems like a contrary choice. But Mancio’s version of Take It With Me (on Silhouette) replaces some of the resignation and despair with passion and defiance.

 'The words are fantastic, and it feels like something I can do honestly,' she says. 'It’s about stripping things down to the bare bones, the combination of melody and lyrics: it’s refreshing that I can’t replicate vocal sound.' And comparing Waits’ crackly drawl (the track is from his 1999 album Mule Variations) with Mancio’s almost muscular defiance is remarkable. 

Mancio is best known, though, for including Latin songs among her American standards. Of Anglo-Italian parentage, she also sings in Spanish, French and Brazilian Portuguese, something she’s come increasingly to enjoy. 'I started singing in English, but it’s a hard language to sing in, because the consonants get in the way,' she comments. 'Brazilian feels natural, and the reaction of Brazilian people is always so warm. As an English singer performing American repertoire, there’s always a feeling that you’re not the real deal, but I never get that reaction from Brazilians.' 

Having established a reputation as a soloist and founded ReVoice, her successful international festival of vocal music (she gave the now-stellar soul-jazz singer Gregory Porter his first UK booking), there are several new projects to look forward to. On Sunday 24 November, in the Pheasantry on King’s Road, part of the Pizza Express Jazz Club, she begins a new partnership with pianist Alan Broadbent. 'Accompanist doesn’t do justice to what that skill is,' she notes.

Though very well known in US as winner of two Grammys for arrangements he made for singers Natalie Cole and Shirley Horn, Broadbent is less well known here. It shows every sign of being a fantastic opportunity for both musicians. 'The duo is incredible, such a pure conversation, you can’t bail out,' she notes passionately. It’s an ideal partnership situation.

Supporting Irish singer Christine Tobin, Mancio is performing the first set. It’s an appealing programme, including versions of Simon and Garfunkel and David Bowie, with long-standing flautist and collaborator Gareth Lockrane (the ticklish, flirtatious tone of the flute balances her voice beautifully) and bassist Geoff Gascoyne. 

Tobin is singing Leonard Cohen, yet another new departure in her incredibly diverse career. 'She makes unusual material utterly believable and cohesive. She's a true artist deserving of a much wider success,' says Mancio. 'I’m delighted to be involved, to be thinking about how the opening set should reflect what comes afterwards.'

One of the most important lessons she’s learned, she says, was from singer Ian Shaw, who 'understands that the audience has come to see you and deserves respect. He knows how to communicate. Some people like him make it look effortless. That’s the difference between a good gig and a great gig,' she says.  

Georgia Mancio will appear with Christine Tobin at 7.45pm on 19 November at the Purcell Room, South Bank Centre. Her duo with Alan Broadbent is at The Pheasantry, on the King’s Road, Sunday 24 November, 8pm. 

Georgia Mancio’s latest album, Come Rain or Come Shine, recorded live on tour in 2012 and 2013, was released earlier this year. She has released three previous studio albums, Silhouette (“Georgia Mancio surpasses herself…An absorbing hour's listening” according to The Observer) Trapeze and Peaceful Place.

ReVoice, the international festival of vocal music she directs, runs each October at the Pizza Express Jazz Club, Soho.