Kate Ceberano

Kate Ceberano has come full circle with her latest jazz album, Bittersweet. "As a teenager I wasn't really attracted to pop music," says the singer who went on to win multiple Countdown, ARIA, MO and many other pop and rock music awards over 25 years. "At the age of 14, I felt like a 40-year-old black woman."

Now 42 (and, to external appearances, still white), Ceberano says she was always in love with the music of the 30s: "'Blue Moon', 'Night and Day', and gospel tunes like 'Summertime'. I started wagging school to watch the midday movies from the 40s, like Casablanca and Gilda."

But this period was not the foundation on which Ceberano built her multi-storey career. "I felt like I was only performing to people in their fifties," she said. When she went to LA to record at Chick Corea's Mad Hatter Studios more than 20 years ago, she was asked: 'You do understand, don't you, that you're not a jazz singer?' I was very dismayed by his judgment and I stopped singing jazz," Ceberano recalls.

This year she returned to that same studio with a vengeance to record Bittersweet with trumpeter Mark Isham, who is also a prolific composer for film. "The cinematic aspects of his playing are all throughout this album," Ceberano says. "I know where I'm cast in it and I have no qualms about being the female. I said to Mark, 'when I record this I want it to sound like I'm nibbling on your ear'. I think it's a very sexy album. It's timeless and elegant; it would serve a person who was requiring that atmosphere for special occasions, for loving and for eating. Australians have been asking me to do an album like this for years."

The tracks include classics by Cole Porter and standards by Duke Ellington and other jazz greats. "Gershwin is so cool. Take this," and she begins to sing softly at our table in the lobby cafe of the Intercontinental Hotel. "My mom will scold me/'Cause she told me/That it's naughty, but then.../Oh, do it again!" She smiles. "The seduction here is exactly what drew me to this music in the first place. I can see Julie London draped across the table. I see An American in Paris with Gene Kelly. There's something so romantic about a traditional love affair. They had to couch it in different terms to what we do now."

But the songs weren't chosen to be sugar and all things nice. "'Lush Life' is an art form in its hopelessness; there's this melancholy that drowns it. It's music that involves addiction; it's cashmere laced with arsenic. It's bittersweet."

Ceberano will perform these songs, along with highlights of her career, accompanied not by Isham but by Australian Idol crooner and trumpeter Carl Riseley. Fans will see the full circle of her career, from growing up loving the golden era of jazz, pushing the present for two decades in pop and rock, and returning to that now even more distant past.

Kate Cebrano plays the State Theatre on Fri 21 Aug.

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