Having sold her Christchurch cottage by the sea and found a new home for her cat, Annemarie Nelson clicked her heels together and set off to chase a dream.
They are notoriously elusive creatures, dreams, so this story like many traces a path of twists and byways, periods of busy activity and quiet. At times the way seemed clear and the dream drew closer, taking shape. At others, it found itself once again packed at the bottom of a travel bag, beneath more immediate everyday concerns.
Nelson is a jazz singer, which perhaps alone explains some of the foregoing, the shifting time and the sense of improvisation.
Consistent with that, the end of the story is somewhat distant from the beginning. But not wholly.
Because, this week Nelson released an album, it’s late-night, low-light stylings available on 100 digital platforms, 14 years after it was recorded.
It was back in 2007 when she gave up the cottage and the cat and headed to Melbourne, timing her arrival for the town’s jazz festival. It was to be the next stage in a musical journey that had seen her front pub bands in Dunedin across several years, playing the familiar haunts - Sammy’s, Regine’s - then shift to Christchurch in the late ’90s to study at the city’s jazz school.
As is often the case, it was a friend who recognised the talent first, but Nelson says she had also heard her voice migrating towards jazz tunes.
"I had done a few songs of that nature with the Oxo Cubans, who I was playing with around ’96, ’97 and I was listening to bits of jazz, I suppose, so when this musician friend suggested it, I thought, that sounds like a good move, sounds like the next move musically."
So, there was jazz school, then teachers college and years of gigging around Christchurch, including late into the night at the Blue Note cafe on Regent St.
Then, finally, the plan to head to Melbourne, step out into the wider world and roll the dice.
It could have been a very short foray, after the first accommodation Nelson lined up didn’t work out, and she ended up driving around friendless in an unfamiliar city, windscreen wipers beating a lonely rhythm against the rain.
"I found a crappy old hotel for a few nights," she recalls. "It was all part of the rock’n’roll thing I guess."
However, having navigated the city’s dubious welcome, Nelson found her feet, made inroads into the local jazz scene and began to get to know the players. A year on and she was ready for the recording studio.
Among the locals with whom she’d come into contact was established player Mark Fitzgibbons, a pianist from a well known musical family. He was commissioned to arrange the songs Nelson had chosen for the album, and to play himself as part of the three-piece backing band.
The risk, the gamble, looked like it could pay a dividend - bankrolled by the Brighton cottage.
But there were slips yet between cup and lip.
Not entirely happy with the initial vocal recording, Nelson took the backing tracks to a second studio to redo them, negotiating the city streets on a 50cc scooter.
"On the way to one of those sessions, it was slightly damp that day, I was at an intersection on this scooter, turned right, I was looking at some woman’s top I thought was quite nice and skidded and fell on the tram tracks."
There were other portents of a plan at odds with the fates.
Just months later, in early 2009, Nelson arranged to do a live recording at a winery in Victoria’s Dandenong Ranges, which was all but derailed by the horrific wildfires that year.
"The day we were rehearsing was labelled Black Saturday, when the heat was just extreme."
For all the trials and tribulations, Nelson ended up with a CD’s worth of recordings, a mix of straight-ahead swing, Latin and jazz ballads.
"My dream was to get a good recording that I was happy with, then I was going to be off to the UK to do all these jazz festivals," she recalls. "But, of course, I was a jazz musician with dreams, I wasn’t a marketer, I obviously didn’t necessarily have the best business head on me. Like a lot of people in the arts world, you have your ideas and you have your product but the next step to get it out there, it doesn’t always come off."
It was a decent enough plan, she reckons now, but important pieces were missing - which soon became apparent.
As many have found before her, just getting set up in the frenetic, perpetual motion machine of London can be a mission. Achieving that took a good bit of her early energy.
It didn’t quite run the plan aground, but the tide was on the ebb.
A few CDs were made, ahead of a cruise ship job. But not more than that. Maybe 20 copies were sold.
"It just fell by the wayside and just gathered dust I suppose," Nelson says.
"When I got back to Christchurch in 2011 I just wasn’t really thinking about getting it out there."
What has made the difference now is the opportunity presented by digital music service platforms, the direct line between musicians and the listening public provided by the likes of Spotify, iTunes, YouTube and the rest. And the urging of her enchanted partner.
It’s on those digital platforms where Nelson’s album can now be found, finally.
And it remains something of a testament to her pathway into the vast panoply of a sprawling genre.
"I fell in love with jazz and I was learning all the songs of the American songbook," Nelson says of that time. "And I loved the feel of the straight-ahead swing, Latin and jazz ballads. So, of course, I was influenced by many jazz vocalists, as well as instrumentalists in the jazz world.
"I was influenced by people like Diana Krall, Dianne Reeves, Betty Carter."
Their back catalogues informed Nelson’s set lists, and in turn choices for the album.
"I wanted a mixed of swing, Latin and ballads on the recording."
And for good measure an arrangement of the Stevie Wonder tune You Are The Sunshine of My Life.
These are well-loved songs — Come Love, Devil May Care, I’m A Fool To Want You - so the task for the performer is to make them their own.
"I guess it is obviously knowing the song well, that certainly helps. Going over and over a song. And through that, I guess, your own personality, your own style comes through as a natural consequence. Of course, you are influenced by other people’s versions of the songs for sure ... then as it gets worked on and is cooking in the oven so to speak, your own style comes through, your own phrasing, your tone, your style, your singing. It just comes out to make it your song, hopefully."
It has been interesting for Nelson to listen to those recordings again now. She hasn’t stood still in the meantime, continuing to work and develop as a jazz musician - most recently joined well-established Dunedin outfit Bare Essentials.
There are things she’d do differently now if she were recording an album, she says, in terms of the choice of material and arrangements. And the financing.
"I probably wouldn’t sell my house to do it."
