Caroll Vanwelden releases Shakespeare Revisited

Caroll Vanwelden’s new album, Shakespeare Revisited, is out today. It’s the fourth record she’s built from Shakespeare’s sonnets, and the boldest: after a trilogy rooted in a working jazz quartet, she’s rebuilt the project around voice, piano, cello, keyboards and electronics, played with two Belgian musicians she’d never recorded with before. I asked her what made her remake something that had already worked so well.

Vanwelden trained as a classical pianist from the age of seven before turning to jazz, studying at the Ghent Conservatory and then the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London. She’s recorded under her own name since 2008, almost entirely self-produced, on her own JAZZ’n’ARTS label. But the Shakespeare project is what she’s known for: three albums released between 2012 and 2017, setting the sonnets’ own words as lyrics inside jazz compositions entirely her own, the closing volume shaped by her father’s death partway through its making. All three kept the same core band, inside a straight-ahead jazz-quartet frame, trumpeter and flugelhornist Thomas Siffling, bassist Mini Schulz, and drums shared, over the three records, mainly by Markus Faller and Jens Düppe.

She’s described the sonnets’ recurring themes of love, jealousy, beauty and mortality as personal rather than academic. “The motifs and guiding lines of Shakespeare are both fascinating and universal,” she has said. “I see myself in all of his motifs and find a huge amount of inspiration within them.”

She didn’t set out to return to Shakespeare. The Shakespeare Festival in Neuss, which had brought her in for the release of each trilogy album plus a later “best of” Shakespeare programme, invited her back for a fifth time. She didn’t want to repeat herself.

“I did not want to return for a fifth time with the same songs, the same musicians and the same musical approach,” she told me, “so I decided to completely rethink the material.”

What she rethought was the whole ensemble. Vanwelden stripped the band down to voice, piano, keyboards, cello and electronics, cutting drums altogether, and brought in two Belgian musicians, keyboardist and electronics player Dominique Vantomme and cellist Jean-François Assy. “I also wanted to work with Belgian musicians this time, as I am now living in Belgium again,” she told me. “The absence of drums gave the music much more space and freedom. I was very inspired by the new sound we discovered together, and I loved the spontaneity of the project so much that I decided to release recordings from our first concert in Neuss, together with recordings from one of our rehearsals at my home.”

Left Caroll Vanwelden, top right: Dominique Vantomme, bottom right: Jean-François Assy.

The nine years between the trilogy’s close and this new chapter weren’t spent away from the studio. In between, Vanwelden made a French-language electronic album on her own: eighteen original songs, written, arranged, recorded and produced without another musician in the room, continuing a pattern of self-production that runs back to Colours. “Working so independently gave me greater freedom in the studio and encouraged me to experiment more with electronic sounds, space and atmosphere,” she told me. “That experience naturally found its way into Shakespeare Revisited.”

When I asked how the new record actually sounds next to the trilogy, she was direct. “The earlier albums were more clearly rooted in jazz ensemble writing,” she said. “This time, I wanted something more intimate, spacious and cinematic, with much more room for the voice, the words, the silences and the individual colours of the instruments.” Without a drummer holding time, the trio can respond to each other more freely. The music, in her words, “still has its roots in jazz, but it also moves towards chamber music, electronic music and art-pop.”

Shakespeare Revisited, the full-length album, thirteen songs in all, is released today. Three singles previewed it over the summer: “Two Loves” (Sonnet 144, April), “So Shall I Live Supposing” (Sonnet 93, May) and “No Longer Mourn for Me” (Sonnet 71, June). Roughly half the record comes from that first Neuss concert with Vantomme and Assy; the rest was recorded during a rehearsal at her own home. “I wanted to preserve the spontaneity of those moments rather than trying to make everything sound overly polished or controlled,” she told me. “That sense of freedom and direct musical communication is an important part of the album.”

She previewed the record in concert a week before release, at Kaffee Damast in Kortrijk, an intimate room suited to a project built for intimacy. It’s the same trio audiences will hear through the rest of the year: Vanwelden on voice and piano, Vantomme on keyboards and electronics, Assy on cello and electronics. I asked what people should expect from the shows. “Rather than explaining Shakespeare,” she said, “we try to make the emotional meaning of the sonnets immediately tangible through the music.”

The tour continues through the autumn and into winter. Vanwelden and the trio play GC Everna in Evere on 12 September, the New Colours Festival in Gelsenkirchen on 25 September, ‘t Loze Vissertje in Rupelmonde on 2 November and The Music Village in Brussels on 8 November, before a cluster of dates closes out the year: Kultuurschuur in Wetteren on 28 November, Ella & Louis Jazzclub in Frankfurt on 30 November, a school workshop at a Gymnasium in Mannheim on 1 December, BIX Jazzclub in Stuttgart on 2 December, and a second Ella & Louis date, this time in Mannheim, on 3 December.

Vanwelden has now set forty-eight of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets to music, across four albums and three distinct sounds. I asked her if there’s one she still wants to reach. She isn’t ready to promise another complete project. “I love all of them, although I cannot claim to know all 154 equally well,” she said. But she doesn’t rule it out, either. “Shakespeare has surprised me before, so I should probably never say never.”

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