Forget about the obvious quality of the writing, the subtle charms of the smoky tunes and the intimacy of the hushed vocals on her second album, My One And Only Thrill - Melody Gardot should not be playing music. Frankly, Melody Gardot should not be walking or talking, let alone singing, recording and touring.
Nearly six years ago a collision with a car all but took her life and looked like leaving her crippled and cocooned within her mind, her brain alert but her body broken. The then 19-year-old fashion student had her pelvis fractured, her spine damaged and suffered trauma to her brain. She could neither talk nor move and there seemed little prospect of that changing.
Even now she can't sit for too long thanks to a misaligned pelvis, uses a cane to stand and walk and suffers from regular neuralgic pain (partly alleviated by a Tens device, a black box sending electrical impulses into her body to stimulate endorphins). Because of accident-induced autonomic nervous system dysfunction, she is acutely sensitive to noise and sound and generally wears dark glasses.
And yet, she recently released that second album, building on the promise of her 2006 debut in ways that transcend cheap talk of "miracle recoveries" and "brave fights". There's enough here to suggest a life in music is assured for a woman who, before the accident, had never considered music beyond part-time jobs playing in piano bars to help pay college fees.
But if music is her life from now, Gardot is quick to point out that the life is only available because of music.
"Without any room for compromise, music is the reason why am I speaking to you," she says in a light lilting voice, which never rises above a gentle murmur. "Flatly and deeply, in the sense that if I had not been doing music I would not be speaking the way I do now."
Among her many other impairments, Gardot had aphasia, which meant she was unable to formulate words - she could think of the words but not make the sounds emerge from her mouth despite having no physical barrier to speech. It's a condition often seen in soldiers returning from Iraq with head injuries but also in sufferers of Alzheimer's disease.
Until two years ago Gardot could speak only with great difficulty. "It was as if 20 minutes would pass for me to speak one sentence and I would sit there trying to break down the levee that was built between my brain and my mouth," is how she describes it.
What took Gardot even to that point two years ago was her doctor's recommendation she use music as therapy. Not just as soothing background noise but as a practical method of rebuilding the pathways in her brain once some functions had returned.
The accident had knocked out the neural pathways, which could be called bridges, between the brain's two cortexes. These convey knowledge, memory, perception and higher functions.
"It made me, for lack of a better word, a bit of a vegetable," Gardot says.
"Internally I was incredibly competent but there was no way to verbally or physically express that ability to connect what was happening in my head to what was happening outside my body. It was impossible. There was no communication.
"Music is one of the only things that helps to reconnect neural pathways in our brain: listening, performing, singing, making a verbal attempt to sing along or hum. In my case this was why it was pointed out to me. First because I had some experience as a young person playing piano bars and so it was an innate ability but furthermore because of its ability to really help me progress when no other progress can be made."
At first Gardot would hum and then sing into a recorder she kept by her bed. She began to write songs for the first time too, chronicling her emotions during the long and painful rehabilitation, including one song called Some Lessons, which has the line "to think I could have fallen a centimetre to the left/I would not be here to see the sunset or have myself a time".
Those early recordings were released as an EP called Some Lessons - The Bedroom Sessions, attracting enough online attention to see her signed by a major label for her full-length debut, Worrisome Heart. As astonishing as her story was it was the music, with its blend of cocktail jazz and torch song, her gentle voice and the comparisons that could be made with Norah Jones and Madeleine Peyroux, that sold her.
Like so much in her story, that music, which now seems so topical and commercially savvy, was arrived at through anything but planning. Although she had been known to play Duke Ellington during her piano bar days, Gardot was just as likely to have been playing Billy Joel. So how did she fall into, if that is the right way to put it, a style of music that would not be on the iPod of your average 19-year-old?
"I didn't wake up and go: 'OK, while I'm trying music therapy I'm going to try and make blues and that didn't work so I'm going to try rock and when that didn't work, I'm going to try jazz,"' Gardot says.
"What I was seeking was a sound that was soothing and to me a trumpet was much more soothing than a guitar. Too much sound was just too much noise. Too many instruments was too much noise. Sticks on the drums were aggravating to my ears so we used brushes; I didn't like the sound of the steel strings on electric bass so we used an upright. It was very logical in that sense.
"But as far as genres were concerned it never crossed my mind. In fact I still don't consider it jazz. As my drummer says, if you took away the drums and the upright bass it's really like folk."
There isn't really a lot of jazz in her songs; they are more easily described as the kind of music you would have found everywhere before rock'n'roll took over, with the recent addition of a bossa nova rhythm for added sultriness. If there is one characteristic her albums share with light jazz it is space. A lot of what's attractive about Gardot's songs are what's not played and what's not said.
"I'm a big fan of motionless sound," she explains. "I love when you're listening to a song and you can hear the harmonies, not because they are there but because they are there in your head. If everything is supported enough it allows for this space where nothing intrudes on your imagination. I like that and there's not a lot of music that does that."
Source: Bernard Zuel/ The Sydney Morning Herald
