Knock on the door of Anne Ducros’s apartment and the door opens wide to reveal a luminous smile and an exuberantly warm welcome. It soon becomes evident that Ms. Ducros is not a woman who believes in doing anything by half. Her radio happens to be tuned to a local radio station broadcasting non-stop jazz and before we’ve even asked a first question, we hear an extract from her new album, Urban Tribe, floating across the airwaves. “Listen, it’s me!” Anne exclaims with delight, flashing another radiant smile from beneath her mane of blonde hair.
Anne Ducros, hot back from Sicily, is clearly overjoyed that her new album is out in record stores at last. The musical globe-trotter, whose hectic schedule included an appearance in New York on Monday, Japan on Tuesday and Moscow on Wednesday, before flying back for the weekend in Paris, has her sights firmly set on the international scene these days. Anne, who hails from the Pas-de-Calais region in northern France, won recognition back home after winning two coveted ‘Victoire de la musique’ awards, a ‘Django d’Or’ and a Prix Billie Holiday from the Académie de Jazz. And now she is looking to fly even higher in the international jazz sphere.

“I’m a firm believer that nothing’s impossible,” Ms Ducros declares, admitting “I’m totally driven by the will to win!” Clearly, we might add, as in 2005 she recorded Piano, Piano with a group of renowned jazz maestros including Chick Corea, Jacky Terrasson, Enrico Pieranunzi and her old friend René Urtreger (who accompanied her when she first started out).

Then, like so many other jazz musicians, came the final “act of rebellion”, the moment when the talented amateur decided to take a giant leap into the unknown and become a jazz pro. “I remember it well,” says Anne, “That was back in 1986. I was 26 years old” and working as a civil servant at the French Ministry of Agriculture. Then from one day to the next, Anne went from desk-job to centre-stage, performing on the jazz circuit. “I was so thrilled,“ she remembers, “that I wanted to go round telling everyone I met in the street that I’d become a singer!”

Becoming a singer was an emphatic act in Anne’s life, the equivalent of thumping a fist firmly on the table and shouting ‘enough is enough !’ This was an act Anne says she frequently had to repeat in her life as she struggled to make a name for herself in a milieu still heavily entrenched in machismo and, occasionally, vulgarity. “It’s very difficult as a female artist to make a name for yourself as a musician once you’re seen as a singer,“she says, “The first artist to succeed on that front was Nina Simone.” Anne still likes to rail against the rigidity and conservatism of her homeland. “It’s like Françoise Sagan once said,“ she quips, quoting from memory, “‘France is a nation which loves revolts but doesn’t want things to change!” And this partly explains, perhaps, why Anne Ducros has put so much of her time and energy into working abroad.

Questioned about her own personal acts of revolt, she replies, “I like the idea of being subversive, the idea of stamping my reality on what I hear!” And this expressionistic approach has been much in evidence on the five albums Anne has recorded to date, from her 1990 debut Don’t You Take A Change to her most recent offering, Urban Tribe, released at the beginning of September. Urban Tribe, recorded in New York , finds the French singer working with the ‘crème de la crème’ of the current jazz scene, performing with Essiet Okon Essiet on double bass, Bruce Cox on drums, Ada Rovatti, the wife of trumpeter Randy Brecker, on sax and the talented pianist and arranger Olivier Hutman.

On her latest album, Ducros reworks a number of jazz classics in her own distinctive scat style, her daring vocal acrobatics giving listeners the impression they are watching some kind of perilous high-wire act performed live without a safety net. Throughout, Anne’s vocals are presented in a raw, brute state, without embellishment or falsification. “I’m not singing songs,” she says, with some insistence. She describes jazz as being a form of music that wreaks “double violence.” Firstly because you have to delve right down “to the very deepest part of yourself”, secondly because “singing jazz basically means telling your life story. It’s about forgetting all sense of personal modesty… You have to accept the idea of being completely and ruthlessly honest with yourself.”

In Anne Ducros’s world, sincerity is a word that has to strike as true as a piano chord. Honesty is the key to producing music that is pure emotion. “Intellectual integrity is the basis for any kind of artistic project,” she declares, “If you want to sing, you have to accept the idea of taking a risk and putting yourself on the line. And if you can ultimately manage to harmonise your educated, erudite side and your wild savage side, then you reach a stage where you’re making real poetry!”

Anne has now chosen to put her erudition and her passion at the service of all budding singers willing to lay themselves on the line. Besides assuring a hectic schedule recording and performing on her own behalf, she also finds time to run her own music school in Paris, L’Ecole Prélude, named after those first initial notes that set the tone for a lifetime.