Madeleine Peyroux: Continental blend

Her music sells cosmetics and is a staple in Starbucks. But the Paris-based American singer Madeleine Peyroux is more than just the smooth, jazz-tinged flavour of the month, says Keith Shadwick

Madeleine Peyroux, latest young jazz-tinged singer on the block: another year, another fresh face, you might think. Another record-company-sponsored breakthrough artist with all the integrity of an alcopops advert. Hang it all, she's photogenic, she's this month's addition to the Starbucks music racks, and one track off her album, Careless Love, was recently used in a commercial for Simple facial wipes.

Madeleine Peyroux, latest young jazz-tinged singer on the block: another year, another fresh face, you might think. Another record-company-sponsored breakthrough artist with all the integrity of an alcopops advert. Hang it all, she's photogenic, she's this month's addition to the Starbucks music racks, and one track off her album, Careless Love, was recently used in a commercial for Simple facial wipes.

Such assumptions are easy to make, but in this case they'd be wrong, at least in part. Peyroux, a 30-year-old born in Athens, Georgia, and possessed of the southern lilt in her singing to prove it, does in fact have French-speaking parents and has been a Paris resident since she was 14 years old.

Her recollections of that time reveal that she was not a typical American teenager. "My parents were older than normal when they had me, and had been very into the politics of the 1960s, so I was brought up in that atmosphere," she reveals. "My father's record collection was full of New Orleans music of all kinds. I used to listen to the radio in New York and all there was on it at the time was Madonna and Michael Jackson, so it sort of passed me by.

"When I got to Paris, it was a different world. French radio - another universe from US radio. I found music that could sustain me. I found jazz and other music that I could call mine."

A resourceful young woman with an independent streak, she decided that she'd had enough of school at 15 and left home in search of a like-minded community. She found it among the buskers of Paris's Quartier Latin, for whom she initially collected money at their performances before finally taking the step into singing. Her first song - the only one she actually knew - was Hoagy Carmichael's "Georgia on My Mind".

Unwittingly, she had found her niche: within weeks she was performing "Georgia" and similar songs for The Lost Wandering Blues & Jazz Band. She stayed with them for three years, travelling Europe and learning her craft along with lessons in the school of life. "I was very lucky. Things happened, both bad and good, but I never got into real, deep trouble. But it wore me down. By the time I was 18, I was done. I didn't want to live the life any more. I needed to develop past the point that busking takes you to." If this sounds like an update on Fairground Attraction's career curve, read on.

In another stroke of synchronicity, she was spotted by Atlantic Records and put under contract. In 1996, her first album, Dreamland, was released. "It was a strange experience," Peyroux recalls. "Things changed so quickly. The Atlantic jazz department just went from under us." The album had had rave reviews in America, with Peyroux's sultry vocal style being compared to Billie Holiday's, but there was to be no follow-through, or follow-up.

"It was quite an education", Peyroux says, ruefully. "Seeing how those companies operate, it didn't amount to a massive vote of confidence in their artists. There was talk of me going to Columbia after that, but nothing happened. I got disillusioned, and I pulled back."

This was after an album that had sold 200,000 copies worldwide on the back of reviews and word-of-mouth. But the music business was changing fast, with few major labels being interested in new artists other than those who could instantly generate mega-sales. Peyroux was out in the cold, and it was still half a decade away from Norah Jones's breakthrough.

Peyroux took another eight years to rethink, develop her singing skills, and then re-enter the recording arena. This time it was with an independent label, Rounder, with a worldwide distribution deal with Universal. The resulting album, Careless Love, was a very different affair from her first.

When I ask her about the decision to broaden out, to sing songs by Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, among others, she says: "It's what I grew up believing in. I had all sorts of music around me, from Fats Waller to French chanson. I had no desire to categorise. I'd not sung Dylan and Cohen before, but once my producer had introduced me to the songs, and I felt they sat well with my voice, then sure, I was going to sing them.

I'm very conscious of developing my singing, technically and stylistically. I want it to become more individual, express more of me. That's my goal. These songs are steps along that way."

Her album is already selling briskly merely through the Simple commercial exposure, word of mouth and radio airplay. She sings and plays acoustic guitar onstage along with her trio, and says that she enjoys performing to an audience, even though she does seem oblivious of them, rarely managing a word in their direction. "To me, that's the best thing. I love playing to people and seeing them react."

Street singing lives on in the music business, courtesy of Madeleine Peyroux.

'Careless Love' is out now on Universal Jazz. Madeleine Peyroux's next concert in the UK will be at the Shepherds Bush Empire, London W9, on 6 August