Nicola Farnon is surely living most musicians’ dream. In demand throughout Europe, the well-travelled jazz singer and bassist toured Ukraine last month. She has played with the likes of Sir John Dankworth and Dame Cleo Laine, but her Nicola Farnon Trio (sax/piano: Piero Tucci, drums: Phil Johnson) still frequents the Sheffield bars where I first encountered it, eight years ago. I couldn’t say how many times I’ve grooved to Nicola’s solid, swinging rhythms since then, but we never exchanged more than passing pleasantries.
Her stage presence is wonderfully warm and upbeat—so it was a great joy to find her equally cheerful when we sat down to chat at a Sheffield pub. Nicola has no cause to be as endearingly modest as she is. The late, great Humphrey Lyttelton (with whom she also shared a stage) once called her “a class act” who “should be on every jazz festival in the land.”
With eight albums behind her, Nicola’s tastes and talents run the gamut of jazz and beyond—but she keeps swinging back to the Great American Songbook. “I think any good music must have an element of swing,” she told me. “Even classical—I always liked Brahms, because his cello has some syncopation in it.”
Nicola’s journey into jazz might be called inevitable, being a great-niece of Robert Joseph Farnon CM. The trumpeter, composer and arranger was the Canadian Glenn Miller, co
