Listening to Flora, the first “single” from Megan Jerome’s album Bloomers, induced a daydream about a smoky Parisian bar, sipping a glass of absinthe, while the artist Toulouse Lautrec flirts with writer Colette and Serge Gainsbourg dances with Jane Birkin while Jerome begins playing another new song, a romantic waltz called Amour on the accordion.

There’s something inherently, unabashedly romantically French about Bloomers, Jerome’s beguiling third album. Playing accordion and piano and singing in English and French, the Ottawa-based singer-songwriter creates a fin-de-siecle style cabaret of songs that takes the listener on an emotional journey leading to erotic adventures. Little Girls, Cocktails, A Field, The Moon, The Stars.

“I like to tell stories,” Jerome explains. “Most of my stories are about women. I’d say my music is feminine in the same way that Tom Waits’ music is masculine. My songs tell stories about women. They’re songs about life, people I know. I write songs the way Marc Chagall paints. You create a moment and distill that moment into a song.”

When it came out in 2010, Bloomers seemed to end up on everyone’s top-10 list. Flora was picked the song of the year by local press, and earned Jerome an invitation to play at all three of Ottawa’s major music festivals — jazz, blues and folk — all in the same year.

“That’s a big accomplishment for a performer to have the support of a diverse range of people,” Jerome says.

But the biggest compliment Jerome’s gotten so far came at the Folk Festival, when two of music’s heavyweight players, Earth Wind & Fire’s Sunny Emory, and Levon Helm and Bruce Hornsby’s Bobby Reid, watched her solo show, and at the end of her set, shared their enthusiasm backstage with the 37-year-old multi-instrumentalist.

Scared silly

“I was having too much fun playing to be nervous about them,” Jerome admits. “Otherwise I would have been scared silly.”

A graduate of Carleton’s jazz piano program, Jerome began playing as a child. Her father, James Jerome — Speaker of the House from 1974 to 1980 and a self-taught piano-player — taught his daughter whimsical songs from the 1920s like Sunny Side of the Street and Paper Moon.

“The older I get the harder it is to find music you really love. That’s why I love Rufus Wainwright. Like him, I want to play the grand piano all by myself.”

She currently teaches piano to children and is an associate at Carleton University. On Feb. 4, she’ll play Cafe Paradiso as part of the new winter Jazz Festival.

—Denis Armstrong, The Ottawa Sun

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