Jamie Cullum performing at Hyde Park, 2009 (Getty Images)  But in the case of the Cole Porter standard, not only has Cullum sung the wrong words, he’s slapped on a bass line inspired by the 2001 song Witness (1 Hope) by Roots Manuva, brought in the British rapper to declaim over the top, and flown in hip-hop producer Dan the Automator to record the song entirely live. Perhaps pointedly, Cullum and his team have chosen Love for Sale as a “taster” single, the first thing people hear of his sixth album.  The result could sound like a dog’s dinner, less hipster mash-up than sacrilegious mess. Cullum’s manager concedes that it was by no means straightforward securing permission for the reworking from the copyright holders at the Porter estate.  Yet this overhaul of the 1930 Broadway showtune works, testament to both music obsessive Cullum’s sure-footedness, and to a track record of inventive reimaginings. He has crafted jazz-ish meanders through Radiohead’s High and Dry and Jimi Hendrix’s The Wind Cries Mary, both featured on his 2004 breakthrough album Twentysomething. “The problem is,” he continues, returning to the issue of errant lyrics, “because I record live, in a room, and the vibe is right – it’s like, what do you want? Perfection in the way it was supposed to be? Or do you actually want to capture the performance? I always go for the latter.”  Jamie Cullum - Love For Sale on MUZU.TV.  We are speaking in late January, at his record company’s West London offices, and this morning Cullum is settling down to a busy day’s work. His management PA asks when he wants to arrive at the Jazz FM Awards, taking place in London three days hence, at which he is scheduled to duet with veteran jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal. “As long as I’m there around the time he arrives,” Cullum tells her. “I just think because he is who he is, it’s a bit rude for him to do all his bit then for me to just turn up at the end. I think he’d be a bit offended by that. He’s 82 and he’s the man.”  There is urgency in the air: in a few weeks Cullum is downing tools for an entire month’s paternity leave. Dahl is about to give birth to their second child, a sibling to two-year-old Lyra (Margot was born five weeks later, on March 4). He’ll be back in the saddle at the beginning of April, a scant seven weeks before the release of Momentum.  From a cold-hearted record industry perspective, the timing isn’t great. Cullum is an artist with global appeal, and a live fan base that is almost out of step with his record sales – even though The Pursuit sold 700,000 copies, a drop from the million that its 2005 predecessor Catching Tales managed, he toured worldwide for two and a half years in support of the album, and demand was such he could have done 18 months more. But taking the time off was a no-brainer.  “I think it’s a case of short and sweet,” he says. (And no, the compact musician is not referring to his marriage to the statuesque 35-year-old model-turned-chef, television presenter and writer.) “Go and do a bunch of gigs, come back, go and do a bunch of gigs, come back. I thought about the idea of doing an intense run of a month then coming back for a month – month on, month off. But I just didn’t want to be away for that long.”  Sophie Dahl and Jamie Cullum performing together, 2007 (Rex Features)  In early April I meet Cullum again. He’s well dressed, while his mop of hair is thatched just so; he’s smartened up significantly since meeting Dahl. We have lunch in a gaudily elaborate restaurant in stockbroker belt Buckinghamshire. Cullum and Dahl live a few miles away, near the Dahl family seat at Great Missenden (location of the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre). They met at a charity event in March 2007, lived together in London for a while, then moved out here around the time of their wedding.  “I wanted a studio, she wanted a kitchen,” he grins. “It’s 40 minutes from town, so it’s not that far, but we live in the woods kind-of-thing. I’ve got a big room with all my instruments and I can make all the noise I want. Now we’ve got a fence and a gate – living the middle-class dream! It’s really nice. I didn’t think I’d like it as much as I do.”  He and Dahl’s courtship began after that fundraising event, held in aid of breast cancer charity the Lavender Trust. “I didn’t know a lot about her,” he admits. “That evening was billed to me as people singing who don’t normally sing. I was due to accompany loads of people but a lot of them cancelled.”  Did he ever think, “wow, I’m singing with a model”? “It’s funny, it kind of crept up on me without there being any build up. I spoke to her on the phone beforehand and I was excited to meet her. But I didn’t know a lot about her apart from her heritage and what she’d done.”  Yes, he acknowledges, when they sang together, from a musical point of view, the pairing worked, “although I’m loath to put too much significance on that moment. We got on instantly but she was very much with someone and made that very clear to me. But we definitely had a…” He stops. “At that point I knew we were going to be friends.  “Sophie’s possibly the most well-read person I’ve ever met. We talked so much about books, and I found out she had a passion for dirty hip hop. So not the person you would imagine! Then we talked about food. About how we both loved breakfast.”  It was a slow courtship, not least because Dahl was at the time living in New York. “It wasn’t until she moved back to England and we started hanging out and, erm,” he squirms, “it just went from there really.”  The supermodel and the jazzer quickly became an odd kind of glamorous power-couple, amazingly well-connected and, pre-children at least, seen at all the right functions – gala balls, fashion-pack gatherings, Elton John hootenannies. To his credit, Cullum was as amused as anyone by the turn around in his life. When I first met him, in 2003, he was living in a cluttered, single-young-man’s flat on a busy, arterial London road near Paddington. With the proceeds of the four-million-selling Twentysomething, he bought a place in equally bustling Kensal Green, setting up a studio nearby. And now, a decade on, he is in a very different place, in every sense of the term. How is he finding the transplant to the countryside?  “Well, I’m back to my natural state, aren’t I?” he smiles, “’cause that’s where I grew up.”  Jamie Cullum aged 4 with his brother Ben (Rex Features)  Cullum was born in Essex, to parents who had met when they both worked at Ford Dagenham. The family – he has an older brother Ben (a musician, albeit one more interested in electronics, and an occasional songwriting collaborator of Jamie’s) – moved to Wiltshire before he was school age. His father’s fleet-car business had made him wealthy, and the Cullum boys were privately educated. Jamie then attended Reading University, taking a course in film and English literature while developing his musical passions on the side.  Throughout his teens he’d always been in bands, usually of an indie-rock persuasion. But jazz was his passion, and while still a student he self-released Heard it all Before, a collection of standards. A record deal with historic jazz label Candid followed, which in turn led to him signing to Decca. Twentysomething, his first release for the major label, made him the UK’s bestselling jazz artist of all time, and his irreverent approach won him fans far beyond the genre – while simultaneously offending cave-dwelling purists.  “And possibly some of the stuff I’m doing on this new record isn’t going to appeal to my original audience,” he says of the fans who loved the Cullum who played as part of a jazz trio. “But the hardcore fans – they’re the ones that are sticking with it really, which is great.”  Now, of course, he has a much more demanding audience closer to home. He said he asked Ben Folds – the American singer-songwriter is one of his heroes – how he coped with fatherhood and the family-disrupting demands of the life of the gigging musician.  “And Ben told me that when you’re working – if you can call it work, which obviously part of it is – you do everything. You don’t go, ‘I only want promotion or a gig tomorrow’ – you do them both. And when you’re home you leave it all at the door.  “So it’s short bursts back and forth. I don’t want to lose context with my family life. I want to be able to say I’ll be back in a few days; not, ‘I’ll see you in three weeks.’ Can’t do that,” Cullum says firmly. And when his wife is ready to go back to work – three years ago she wrote and presented a BBC Two cookery show, The Delicious Miss Dahl – will there be a sense of, “OK, now it’s your turn to work”?  “Absolutely. And I’m more than happy – I’m excited to do that. And that is obviously the luck of being creative for a living: you can make those choices.”  Sophie Dahl and Jamie Cullum, 2008 (Rex Features)  On The Pursuit, Cullum had his then new girlfriend sing backing vocals. But his now-wife isn’t on Momentum. How about toddler Lyra – given that Cullum recorded much of the building blocks of Momentum at home, I wonder: did he sample his two-year-old’s voice and work it into any of his arrangements? Cullum gives a guilty smile. “No, but I’ve got this amazing picture, a silhouette of her. I’m sitting at the piano, just playing, she’s got her toy keyboard out, facing away from me, playing on the floor. Sophie took it – it’s one of my favourite pictures,” he beams.  “It went through my mind briefly, ‘oh, that’d be nice to put on the album sleeve.’ But you know what? I just don’t want them dragged into it. It’s not fair.” He gives a happy shrug. “Until they can make a decision for themselves, I just want to keep that separate.”  Momentum is out on May 20, through Island Records  Follow Telegraph Music on Twitter
Jamie Cullum has always been careful not to let his marriage to Sophie Dahl   seep into his music. But on his new album, Momentum, it was unavoidable, he   tells Craig McLean.