Kid, I wanna make you a star
Project Cool winner Jodie Borlé launches her debut disc
John Kendle



Jodie Borlé can remember the day she decided she wanted to be a singer. She was seven or eight and her elementary school choir teacher was asking a class who should sing the solo in a piece they were working on.

“Everyone said ‘Jodie will, Jodie will,’ and that was when I knew. Somehow I just knew,” says the jazzy pop singer.

Some 20 years later, Borlé is indeed a singer — one about to launch her first full-length CD, a 12-song effort called and then I did… which she recorded last year with Winnipeg singer/songwriter Mark Reeves serving as her producer.

Like most independent artists, Borlé had to pull financing together in order to properly release the album. She got a huge boost up the ladder of success in September when she won the $75,000 grand prize in the Project Cool 2005 competition, a contest sponsored by 99.1 Cool FM that aims to boost the careers of local jazz and jazz-influenced performers.

“Oh yeah, (the album’s) had about six release dates already,” she says. “With scheduling and money and everything that goes into it, it’s tough to get everything together. I have a nine-to-five job and then a five-to-nine job, and Mark was on tour. It’s tough.

“But now it’s like I have complete backing to try and turn this into a career.”

With the funds and resources now available to her, Borlé feels she can give and then I did… the marketing and promotions push it deserves. Because of her Project Cool win, Borlé has been connected with Toronto-based Doug Kirby, the man in charge of one of Canada’s premier booking agencies, Live Tour Artists, which handles tours for the likes of Jane Bunnett, Sue Foley, Fred Eaglesmith and Susan Aglukark.

The pair have yet to meet, but Kirby will be in town for Borlé’s CD release bash on Dec. 10.

“Meeting with Doug means everything will be put in place for the coming year,” Borlé says. “We can go over my repertoire, he can critique my show, and we can finalize the plan for what we intend to do.”

Borlé says her initial instinct is to tour and to try to interest record labels in releasing or distributing and then I did…, but she doesn’t rule out any possibilities, including that of making another album.

Not that she should have to. The new disc is a fine representation of Borlé’s jazzy alto, and she offers wonderful readings of songs written by several local songwriters, as well as covers of Squeeze’s Tempted, Natalie Merchant’s San Andreas Fault, Blue Rodeo’s Hasn’t Hit Me Yet and Tom Waits’ San Diego Serenade.

Featuring a funky, swinging band that includes some of the city’s best young talent, the recording is a smooth take on an old sound, and Borlé says the decision to mix original material with covers from the world of pop and rock was deliberate.

“I’m trying to take my vocal education, which is an Ella Fitzgerald way of singing, and fuse it with this love I have for songs from other genres — to try and maybe create new standards or a new style of jazz with my own sound,” Borlé explains. “It’s hard to interpret standards in a new way, and I know that won’t impress the purists, but I want to try and create something.”

It’s a brave move, but Borlé is not alone in the desire to expand the jazz songbook. Even Diana Krall tried to create new standards and a new language of jazz with her latest album, The Girl in the Other Room. Of course, Krall did have husband Elvis Costello writing for her and co-writing songs with her.

That said, Borlé has landed a couple of winning tunes from her producer, Mark Reeves. Both Round, the first single from the new disc, and Angel are immediately familiar pop tunes, sung lovingly and faithfully by their interpreter.

“Round was a song he played me the first time we sat down to work together,” says Borlé, who first met Reeves at the 2003 Western Canadian Music Awards in Regina.

“We were going through songs I might be able to sing and he started playing this melody. He didn’t have any words for it yet, but I heard it and I just said, ‘It’s the song for me… That’s my song,’” she recalls.

The song has since become Borlé’s signature tune, especially at Cool FM, which has been extensively supportive of its young protege.

All the attention that has come her way since winning Project Cool has been a little head-spinning for Borlé, she admits. But she’s also a matter-of-fact person who tries to take things in stride. And she’s not afraid of hard work.

After all, this is a young woman who voluntarily studied after hours in the vocal-jazz program at Windsor Park Collegiate, who signed up for private vocal lesson when she was 14, and who entered the University of Manitoba’s School of Music knowing full well that jazz wasn’t as well-respected academically as it is now that Steve Kirby is running a full jazz program.

“I was doing noon-hour recitals of jazz standards, and it was very different from what they wanted. Some of the professors really looked down on jazz as not being real music,” she says.

“But I just knew that’s what I wanted to do. Especially after I went to my first big-band dance at the U of M and saw a girl singing and realized that I could do what she’s doing and that I wanted to do what she’s doing.”

As she talks, the 28-year-old who knew at age seven that she would be a singer realizes how far she’s come.

“I’ve done other stuff but I had no real emotional connection to it,” Borlé says. “This music is me. It’s what I feel.”

Then she tells the story of recording San Diego Serenade, the Tom Waits song, after bawling in the studio over a guy.

“Mark was trying to get me to think about the song in romantic terms, and I guess I didn’t know I felt so strongly, and I was crying. He wondered what was going on, then he came in and looked at me and said, ‘We have to do it now. Let’s go.’

“So I sang the song. One take and then it was done.”

If Borlé can feel connections that strongly, a lot of people will be wondering what she might feel next.

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