(The other two being this one and this one).

I was handed this last night while I was on stage:

Is this a request for a Norah Jones song, or an invitation?

There was no phone number, so unfortunately I can only assume the former.

As I was here - take a look at this video of Ella Fitzgerald performing at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1969:

Ella was a precursor to Crazy Frog! Who knew?!

Actually, at around 3:26 Ella is also a precursor to Rolf Harris. But stick with it, because it gets even better. And there’s not a duff note in all amazing 6 minutes and 35 seconds of it.

Lunch today was with M, the pianist/singer who I was put in touch with before I came out here. As I told him today, planning to meet up with someone, only to do it two months later, is very ‘London’. Who knew that life in sleepy Penang could be so similar?

M took me to a place in Georgetown which is a sort of souped-up (as it were) hawkers’ foodstall gathering. A cross between this place and a food court, I guess:

I ate great veggie curry, a pancake with peanuts, syrup and sweetcorn inside it - which tasted not unlike like Snickers, with sweetcorn - and ice kachang (sp?), a dessert which seems to consist of water, ice, milk and kidney beans (no, really) and which tastes of bubblegum. And which looks like this.

My favourite dish’s name - by which I mean favourite name, as opposed to favourite dish - in Malaysia remains this, however:

Although this comes a close second:

So that was lunch.

The gig tonight was… surprisingly low-key, in many ways. The band has an energy about them, and tonight it was… well, yes, low-key. Nothing very wrong with that; but I think I’ll do a different setlist for tomorrow night and make sure it’s pretty uptempo all the way.

The bar was half-full (as opposed to half-empty: that’s the kind of gal I am) and CC turned up with R, the jazz singer he performs with at another restaurant - who’s probably sixtysomething, and very glamorous, and sounds like Nancy Wilson. Not to talk to, you understand, but to hear sing (CC once played me a live recording of her at the Penang Jazz Festival). It was lovely to meet her, and a discussion on the Great American Songbook writers led to me lending her my book on the subject.

T2 and HH also came along tonight; as did T and C and E. As with me, they had picked E up at KL (OK, now this initial thing is getting *really* silly) and had driven her up here. It was really good to meet her, and she seems very nice. She quizzed me about how things were, and I filled her in, before she retired to bed; she’d barely slept on the flight. I told her about the benefits of remaining in jetlag, because it seamlessly becomes musicians’ hours, but she didn’t seem very convinced. And she also told me that she (and her boyfriend) had been reading my blog every day. So if you’re reading this back in Austria: gruess Gott! Sie ist sicher angekommen. (Can you tell my degree is in German?)

(The funny thing is, E even looks like me. Someone pointed her out, and there she was, a pale-skinned, dark pony-tailed, sweeping-fringed woman in the bar.)

As you can tell by the time this will be posted, I stayed up late after the gig. T had brought a couple of guys with him to do some filming; so they were shooting during the gig and afterwards interviewing me (on film) downstairs in the lobby. This ultimately led to being the place where we night owls hung out; and ultimately led to a big argument-slash-discussion on morals and rights and wrongs and, well… I won’t bore you with it here. Suffice it to say: I wish I’d had you with me, Peter or B or Rachel or Sarah, to back up my views against a vociferous Malaysian male ;-).

So now it’s 6am, I’ve just heard a Muslim prayer calling outside my window, and that must surely mean it’s time for bed. Not that I think that’s what they’re praying about… but hey, it works for me. Once again: night night, all.

JazzChantoozieitsJazzChantoozieturningthefinalbendandapproachingthefinish
line…yesitsJazzChantoozieJazzChantoozieleadingthefield…butwaitaminute…
whatsthis?…comingupbehindJazzChantoozieitsReplacementAustrianJazzFilly!
ReplacementAustrianJazzFillyisapproachingJazzChantoozie…shescatchingup
…butJazzChantoozieisstillinthelead…JazzChantoozieisleadingthefieldwith
ReplacementAustrianJazzFillyaclosesecond…myworditsalmostneckandneck…
willJazzChantooziefallatthefinalhurdle?

Hopefully not.

Actually, a better analogy than a horse-race would have been a relay, with me handing over the baton. But then I don’t think athletics commentators talk quite as fast as horse-racing commentators. So it would have been a bit boring, to write that commentary.

So, hey ho. Here I am, coming into the final straight, indeed.

I have a final rehearsal with the guys in a few hours - I want to make sure our final two performances are as good as they can be - and in the meantime, may start packing. Or more likely: do some gift-shopping. On Sunday I go back to Ipoh, where T and C live (funny, that looks like ‘Clive’. Her name isn’t Clive, though); and then on Monday I go to Kuala Lumpur - or KL as everyone calls it here - to spend my final night at the Hilton (the Hilton, I tell you!), before flying back on Tuesday, and landing in the UK on Wednesday.

It really hasn’t hit me that this time next week, I will be back home.

Partly because I’ve been hearing about the snow; and that makes it all the harder to imagine. How on earth am I going to top up my tan?! Tell me that!!

I’m already expecting it to feel very dream-like, this experience. That I will be sitting back home, in my little (probably cold) flat, and be thinking: “Did that really happen?”. I know what it’s like flitting between New York and London seeing B, having two lives; with each place, and the life lived in it, suddenly and abruptly seeming like a dim and distant memory - even though it may only have been 24 hours previously that I was there. And yet conversely, each time I’d return to the place, whether London or NY, it would feel like only five minutes since I was last there, even if many months had passed between visits.*

Clearly, man wasn’t meant to travel quite such distances quite so quickly. But then man also engineered planes, so go figure, evolution fans.

As for the Austrian Jazz Filly - yes, the new singer arrives (with T) today to pick up the microphone-shaped baton. Or rather, to pick it up on Tuesday, after I’ve gone. Although you never know, I may call her up on stage to do a duet tomorrow night.

E (for that is her initial) won’t be performing with the same trio as me; and I don’t know whether it was my suggestion or what T had planned anyway, but she’ll be singing with two different, alternating bands. This is a much better way to work it, as it’s hard to secure players for a six nights a week (they normally have other regular residencies which, understandably, they don’t want to give up for a two-month booking); and also, perhaps most importantly, it means that he can book the guys who are already playing, and know and love, jazz.

So… off to the shopping mall for final, final-gift buying. There just wasn’t enough utter tat and Michael Buble CDs at the street market, y’know?

*I called this phenomenon TARDIBAR: ‘Time And Relative Dimension In B And Andrea’s Relationship’.

A silly thing happened today. I was looking at videos of old jazz performances on YouTube, and found myself going from link to link to link until I ended up watching a few scenes from a film I’ve never seen before.

(I think the sequence of events was Betty Carter > Charlie Haden > Charlie Haden & Pat Metheney > film clip.)

The film was Two For The Road - and the reason I was led there is that Charlie Haden and Pat Metheney, on their lovely album Beyond The Missouri Sky, played the theme tune from this movie, which is by Henry Mancini. Apparently ‘Two For The Road’ was his own favourite out of all the songs that he wrote.

But that’s by the by.

Two For The Road was made in 1967 and stars Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney as a married couple going through a bad time; and the movie traces their relationship in the form of flashbacks. Like I say, I’ve never seen it - I just gathered this from the clips on YouTube and from the write-up on IMdb.com.

But once again: that’s all by the by.

The reason I’m writing this is that one of the clips made me cry. And it doesn’t matter really very much what it was about… Because what I’ve realised is that I’m finding it difficult, these days, to watch lovers. Or actors pretending to be lovers.

I get up on stage and sing love songs every night; and yet I am yearning, longing for love. And feeling its absence so acutely that it hurts. I feel like I’m clinging to something, and barely hanging on to it.

It’s two years ago to the weekend that I met B.

And I miss him.

And my heart is at a loss. And I don’t quite know what to do.

Maybe I shouldn’t even publish this.

But what the hell…

Night night, all.

To scat, or not to scat? That is the question. Well, at least the question I posed on jazz.com, which has just published another article (well, more a ’short opinion piece’ than an ‘article’) by me on its blog and homepage. Hurrah! Click below to read it:

And yes, it’s official: I am a ’singer/writer/blogger’. It must be true, because jazz.com says so. I’m not sure whether I’m prouder of the fact that I’ve achieved this status, or the fact that my name has appeared on a website alongside Wayne Shorter’s. Either way, it feels good .

When I first arrived in Penang, I noticed that the hotel’s spa offered a range of treatments. One of these was a facial which involved ‘whitening’. I didn’t think much of it - I don’t tend to, where this silly ‘beautifying’ malarkey is concerned - although I’m sure I vaguely wondered whether that meant the facial also included whitening your teeth. “How interesting,” I thought. And how wrong I was.

Not that the idea of a facial which also offers teeth-whitening isn’t interesting. Indeed, it’s so “interesting” as to be “completely silly”. Because, obviously, I got it completely wrong - as multiple trips to the pharmacy next door over the past few months have proved.

While the beauty products - or more precisely, the skincare products - on offer in a Malaysian pharmacy look exactly like the ones for sale back in the West, more than a cursory glance shows that there’s one, rather stark, difference. It’s the presence of products like this:

and this:

Yes, my fellow Western ladies: we may think we have it tough, being subjected to the pressure to be thin. But women in the East not only face that (slimming and dieting products are everywhere here, too - despite, or perhaps because of, the general smaller build of Asians); they are also told that they should be more white.

As this article in the New Straits Times pussyfoots around says, the culture here rather uncomfortably tells people - and most specifically, women - that it is desirable to have skin as white as possible; and there are all manner of beauty products (and spa treatments) on hand to make that happen. Lancome, Chanel, Estee Lauder, Clinique, Dior, Olay… they’re all at it.

Clearly there’s a link here between being white and being of a higher class, as well as the implication that it is better to look as least ‘Asian’ as possible. Being of a darker skin is associated with being of a race that is more undesirable; or of a lower class (all that working outdoors in manual jobs).

Conversely, of course, we in the West see having darker skin - but not too dark, mind! - as something desirable, as at its roots it has the association with being either a) healthy (all that time spent outdoors) or b) rich (all that leisure time spent outdoors).

It’s all very strange, and rather worrying. Where will it end? Well, apart from ‘with Michael Jackson’, that is?

The way you know about a watermelon.

Check out the adorable black puffball dress I just bought from a boutique shop next door (new shoes, too. £10. A snip!). Well, I do have a wedding to go to when I get back…

Another strange day today.

Well, strange evening. The daytime wasn’t too strange. I went over to R’s and did that planned recording with him. This included a voice and piano version of ‘Love Is A Losing Game’ - possibly the first cover version of that song to be put to vinyl, or whatever medium people use nowadays* - and ‘Little Sunflower’ and ‘Route 66′ sung over pre-recorded sessions already laid down (as they say in the biz that is show) by his two kids earlier in the week.

The evening then started strangely when L was very upset about an incident at the hotel. His reaction was possibly, probably, exaggerated - but I’ve realised that he’s a very sensitive man, and feels things very deeply. And I admire him for those qualities.

But then I got upset (honestly, we musicians! Tcha!). Over the fact that the horrible incident - I can’t even bring myself to hyperlink it - hasn’t quite resolved itself in the way that I guess I’d expected, or at least wanted, it to.

I suppose I wanted closure, or even justice, about what happened to me, before I left. No, correction: any time. But ideally before I left.

But now it looks like it’s not to be; not just before I left, but at all. The perpetrator has, in short, got away with it.

I suppose that finding that out this evening not only led me to feel more hurt and wronged than I did before, but also brought back all the other feelings which I’d felt about That Incident at the time. Feelings which I had managed to overcome - or at least suppress - until now.

But again, as before, I don’t want these feelings to marr my time here - especially now that I am in my final week.

And getting on stage tonight and making music did wonders for that. I’ve said often that I’m never sad when I sing - and it’s true. Sure, I might get emotional during a sad song, and absolutely feel what I am singing at that moment. But earlier this evening, after I cried down the phone to T, I genuinely thought to myself: ‘Thank goodness I’m going to make music tonight’.

Because as anyone who’s ever done karaoke knows: music really is wonderful therapy. (Insert exception here).

*since Doris Stokes died.

*sigh*