Singer-songwriters are a relatively recent development in jazz. The canonical singers—artists like Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan—are revered mainly for the emotional or technical virtuosity with which they interpreted, or spontaneously subverted, the words and melodies of others.
Holli Scott is very much informed by this tradition; she’s a consummate improvisor, with a distinctive sound and refined technique. But on both her first album, DUST, released in 2019, and last year’s Weather and Weeds, most of the songs she sings are her own.
You could say that Holli is part of a smaller, still-incipient tradition of jazz singer-songwriters, founded by Betty Carter and Abbey Lincoln. She doesn’t emulate either of these great artists though; her aim is not to venerate tradition but to carry it forward in her own stories.
This artistic orientation allows Holli to draw inspiration from modern storytellers working in other genres and art forms—from singer-songwriters like Fiona Apple and Tom Waits to poets like Margaret Atwood and Alison Whittaker.
It has also led her away from an approach to writing lyrics that’s popular among jazz singers, in which words are set to pre-existing melodies or—in the case of the style known as vocalese—recorded improvisations. In both cases, the music shapes the lyrics. Holli favours the inverse approach; she’s currently researching a PhD on lyric-driven composition.
Last month, under the watchful eye of her small dog, Norman, I spoke with Holli about songwriting, artistic growth, recording Weather and Weeds, and her new collaboration with trumpeter Jessica Carlton and guitarist Dom Barrett.
I want to start by talking about songwriting. There’s not a long singer-songwriter tradition in jazz, so I’m curious to know whether your influences come mainly from within the genre or outside of it.
The songwriting, especially the lyrics, definitely comes from outside. There are some very inspiring jazz vocalist-composers but, compared to the amount of instrumental stuff, there's not a large body of original vocal music branching away into new territory, because a lot of it draws on the fifties, sixties or seventies.
Growing up, there were three singer-songwriters that I loved and looked up to: Sarah Blasko, Lisa Mitchell and Kate Miller-Heidke. There was plenty of older stuff as well. Mum played lots of Crowded House; I always loved their lyrics. She also played Cassandra Wilson and Billie Holiday. Now, I feel I’m very much influenced by Fiona Apple, Tom Waits and Nick Cave.
I’m always struck by your melodies, which are exceptionally clear and compelling. I feel like there’s more of a direct jazz influence there, in terms of chromaticism and bluesiness.
For sure. Jazz composers—like Wayne Shorter—definitely influence the melodies. But they also come from the words a lot of the time, so there's a lot of starting and stopping and odd multimeter stuff happening. That’s not deliberate at all. I’m often thinking “Is this too simple?” Then I write it out and think “Oh my god”.
This all relates to the PhD you’re working on, exploring lyric-driven composition. It seems like, with a lot of songwriters, the words and the music influence each other; there’s a process of give and take. Is that how it usually is for you?
It's probably more on the lyric side, at least for the start of a piece; the words trigger melodic ideas. But the idea with the PhD is to write words that are not necessarily conducive to easy melodies. So I’ll be writing free verse poetry, and then trying to find a way to naturally make that into music involving interaction and improvisation—all of which will be informed by the lyrics.
I’ve completed the lit review for my proposal, and the closest precedent I’ve found is classical art song. But there’s no improvisation there, and usually the composer uses a poem written by somebody else, so you don’t have the same train of thought all the way through.
I’ve been trying to think of precedents in jazz. I know that Kurt Elling has set various poems to music over the years, but I’m not sure what his process is for that.
Yeah, I know he collaborated with Fred Hersch on his Walt Whitman project. I can’t like that record as much as I want to; it feels not entirely driven by the lyrics. But I did look into Fred Hersch’s process for it. He said that he recited the words over and over until they revealed their rhythm or melody. That will be part of my process, but not the whole thing.
An important part of your work to date has been your collaboration with Jamie Oehlers. He’s featured on both your albums, and I feel like I can hear how much he enjoys being a part of your music and playing with and around your voice. What do you enjoy about working with him?
I find Jamie’s playing so inspiring. He opens up possibilities that you didn’t know were there and forces you to be in the moment, because you can’t do anything else when you’re playing with him. He's kind of conditioned me to be okay with any—to put it bluntly—weird shit he throws at me [laughs].
Halfway through my third year at WAAPA he got me to start alternating with Victoria Newton on his regular gig at the Terrace Hotel, and that was pretty challenging. It got me used to playing with him and to being creative in the moment. It's very scary when you first start doing that, but I think he's pushed me—in a good way—to be okay with all of that stuff. And also now, when I write, I leave space for him to do that.
When you say that you had to be creative in the moment on that Terrace Hotel gig, do you mean that you didn’t know in advance which tunes you were going to play? Or where they were going to go harmonically?
Both! There was never a plan; it was usually just Jamie calling tunes and setting tempos, or sometimes different time signatures. One time he thought I was singing everything too low, and that I wasn't adventurous enough in my top range, so he made me put everything up a third [laughs].
It’s funny you mention that, because I saw Jamie in a promotional video for Weather and Weeds talking about how you’d been using your top range more, and that you were a bit reluctant to do that in the past, and I wondered if there was a story behind that.
Yeah, he's always said that he likes the top part of my range. The reluctance was mostly a mental block from when I was younger. I had a high school singing teacher briefly who told me I would never get past a B-flat and if I could never do that, I would never get into WAAPA, so I kind of just gave up.
Oh no!
And I was never allowed to change keys when I was at school, and because of where my range sat, that meant that I just couldn't do it, so I had no confidence.
Then I went to a jazz camp at WAAPA for saxophone and I ended up singing, because my mum wrote on the application form that I also sang. Libby Hammer was there, and I remember her bringing out all these charts and asking me “Which key do you want?” And I was like “What? Is this a thing?” That was the first time I sang comfortably, and all of the lecturers there encouraged me to audition for voice.
You were talking about Jamie getting you comfortable with weirdness, which kind of brings me to Weather and Weeds, because Tal Cohen is another musician with a harmonic concept that really scares me, and you’ve got both of them on the album! The trio setting really left you with nowhere to hide as a vocalist, so I wanted to ask you about your decision-making around that, how you prepared for the recording, and what the experience was like.
Honestly, the “nowhere to hide” thing—how exposed I was—was not part of the decision-making at all. I don’t think I considered that, and I don’t know at what point in my life I stopped considering that.
It was the space that I really wanted—not having everybody occupying the same sonic space or filling it up—even though the music is quite busy at times. I wanted the vocal to be able to breathe. And at the time I was making those decisions, I was enjoying the formats that I played in with a lot more space; as opposed to the quintet, which is what I'd used for a long time.
Obviously I loved Jamie's playing, and I loved Tal’s; I loved Innocent Dreamer. And then Tal heard my set the same year that he was playing at the Perth International Jazz Festival. I would not have had the guts to ask him to play on my record, except that he came up to me afterwards and said he liked my set. So that was the start of it. Then we managed to get funding and record when he was back in Perth.
But yeah—having that space around the vocal was the main motivation for stripping back the instrumentation.
I feel like it puts everyone on more of an even footing, whereas a quintet tends to sound more like a rhythm section with vocals or horns on top.
There was definitely more space for Jamie and Tal to be creative—and percussive, because there was no drummer. I’m so grateful for the experience of working with them. By the second rehearsal everything just started to fit.
How structured were the songs at that point?
Pretty structured. Because we only had two rehearsals, it all had to be good to go.
There were only a couple of very minor things about the arrangements that we decided to change in the studio. But yeah, everything else was charted. Obviously I gave them lots of room to interpret things but, structure-wise and arrangement-wise, it was all there.
What did you take away from the experience of recording in that stripped back setting?
That’s a hard question… I think it stretched me. Every time I record, the experience pushes me a little bit further into something that I wasn't before. And I think this definitely did that, but tenfold compared to my first album, because the tunes were not as overplayed when I recorded them. They were all relatively fresh—a lot of them were very fresh. And then I also had the spoken word stuff, which was very different…
It just felt a lot more emotional, and I felt more able to access things that I couldn't hear before. And hopefully that will happen again the next time I record.
I felt like I could hear you stretching more in your improvising; towards the end of “Flood”, Jamie and Tal start tearing it up harmonically, and you’re right in there with them.
The chart says: “Descend into madness”.
Beautiful. Does performing spoken word feel more vulnerable than singing?
Yeah, probably, for me at least—I don’t like speaking to people [laughs]. So that was an extra thing that I decided to do for the sake of the project, overlooking how uncomfortable I would be doing it. But because I did it, it’s now something that I feel able to do, and part of my process. So the risks always—hopefully always—end up becoming part of me as a composer.
A few months after you released Weather and Weeds you performed in Melbourne with Andrea Keller, Sam Anning and Carl Mackey for one of Andrea’s Monday night gigs at the Jazzlab. I feel like there’s a special atmosphere at those gigs, so I was wondering how the experience was for you.
It was a very quick rehearsal—like half an hour—so it was a different experience. But it was amazing to play with them. I played with Carl years ago when he lived in Perth, but I'd never played with Andrea or Sam before, despite admiring them a lot.
Andrea has such authority in her presence, even though a lot of the time she doesn't take up a huge amount of space in the music. Playing with her was a very different experience to playing with any of the other piano players I’ve ever worked with.
Let’s talk about your new project with Jess Carlton on trumpet and your partner, Dom Barrett, on guitar.
It's still in the early stages, but we'll record eventually. It's called In This Nest of Found Things—or Nest for short. Each one of us is bringing in pieces, most of them written specifically for the group. And, yeah… It's a very different experience, again. I'm very used to playing with Dom, and I also don't feel bad about saying “play less”, which I probably would feel bad about saying to somebody else. It feels like we're all on equal footing, and there's a lot of interaction. It’s more ECM—very open, lots of improvising. I’m really excited about it. There’ll be a project launch soon.
I’m looking forward to it. I’m a big fan of Jess’s work; she’s so thoughtful in everything she does.
She's very comfortable saying less, and it means more when it's framed that way. There’s a maturity there that’s way beyond her age—to be comfortable with space and being minimal, and to mean everything that you say musically. I think that's a big part of her vibe, and it's also something that I know is important to Dom; he’s a huge Bill Frisell fan. So it's a nice place to be in musically, and it also feels very safe to experiment.
It'll be nice to hear a bit more of Dom’s playing. I’m really only familiar with Frosty Leo, whose work I appreciated both on record and in the medium of Instagram stories.
Dom’s incredibly musical, and I'm very fortunate to have him in my house, even though we rarely find the time to actually play music together. He's got a really strong background in improvised, spacious music with orphans and UMBRA, so he's coming from that place. But also, even though he hasn't released any jazz music under his own name, he's constantly composing. I'm excited for people to hear his stuff; I think his writing is beautiful.
He co-wrote “Back the Way We Came”, right?
Yeah, he wrote a small part of the melody for that one. We were going to do something collaboratively with it, but then in the end that didn’t happen and I just kind of took it and turned it into a song [laughs].
I don’t mean to minimise his contribution either. I just always feel like I have to be very clear, because as a female vocalist with a harmonic player for a partner, there’s sometimes an assumption that he’s written all of the music, which is very much not the case. In fact, Dom often gets mad at me when I ask him to play my tunes on the fly, because they’re full of slash chords!
Part of the reason for the assumption is probably because, at least proportionately speaking, there’s not a lot of original jazz vocal music out there—although there are some amazing vocalists who are composers.
Who have you been listening to recently?
Gian Slater’s recent solo album was beautiful. I love Ruby Gill, whose songwriting is in more of a folk setting and very lyric-driven—there’s a lot of authority there, and it feels real. I love lyrics that aren’t lined up perfectly for your consumption; that feel like something that’s just tumbled out.
Gregory Alan Isakov—I love his stuff, which is more like folk-country as well. Lauren Kinsella is someone I have really gotten into since researching for my PhD. She has a project called Thought-Fox, which is quite out, dissonant stuff—some of it with lyrics. I love Outpost of Dreams, the Norma Winstone and Kit Downes duo album…
Often I'll listen to the same things for, like, six to twelve months and not much else.
I think that suits me better as well. Sometimes if I listen too widely I get overwhelmed and feel like I’m not taking it all in.
Yeah, I get that as well. I like to absorb all of it—the instrumental parts, the improvisations and everything. It all goes in, if you sit with it for long enough.
Oh—and Cécile McLorin Salvant. She’s got a new album coming out. You can always count on her to push a lot further with each new recording.
Yeah, talk about stretching! I don’t want to take up too much more of your time—is there anything else you want to talk about before we finish?
One thing that I don’t often really talk about when I’m talking about music is the influence of poetry, which is a big part of it for me. Poets like Margaret Atwood, Alison Whittaker… Esther Ottaway is a neurodivergent poet who’s amazing—Jess recommended her to me. There’s a lot of things in their work that inspire music, directly or indirectly.
I assume that’ll be particularly relevant for your PhD as well.
Yeah—I’m interviewing poets as well as composers of lyric-based improvised music. So it’ll be really interesting to hear about their process—particularly when it comes to the sound and texture of words, which I want to try to honour in the composing process.
When it comes to composing for the PhD, will you be experimenting with different processes?
I kind of have a process laid out, but it’ll be informed by the interviews. It’s an iterative process, so it goes around and around with different adjustments.
But the poetry is being written with stream-of-consciousness idea generation, which will be very interesting—especially because that’s all data that my supervisors look at [laughs]. So the whole process is going to be very exposing.
I guess you’ll have to resist the urge to censor yourself during the creative process, otherwise you’re not going to get as deep as you might want to go.
Yeah, absolutely. I'm still coming to terms with that though!