Gwyneth Herbert

In a sense, there has probably never been a better time to be a girl singer - the charts are full of 'em - but these are within strictly defined market niches: the mid-'00s were all about the ‘retro chanteuses'; this year's thing is ‘chicks with synthesizers'. Simply being yourself, it seems, isn't good enough. In this fiercely strategized atmosphere, the sound of an honest, uncontaminated voice is worth more than gold.

Gwyneth Herbert is just such a priceless talent. At 27, she has already plunged into the world of record deals and promotional schemes a couple of times, and yet she resurfaces again only more pure, more committed in her belief in music's power to communicate emotion and experience to a listener.

Gwyneth first broke onto the scene five years ago, when she was signed up by the Universal conglomerate as a jazz crossover artist. Finding that role too stifling, she soon struck out on her own, as a singer-songwriter, inspired as much by Janis Ian and Joni Mitchell, as by Billie Holiday or Nina Simone.

Gwyneth has been making music since she was a little kid. Her parents lived in Guildford, before moving out to rural Hampshire. "I grew up in a really small village," she says, laughing, "the most unhip environment you could ever imagine. My Dad keeps bees and makes pickles. My Mum is chairwoman of the parish council."

While at university in Durham, she embarked on her first grown-up musical project, a jazz duo called Black Coffee, alongside guitarist Will Rutter, a kindred spirit with whom she'd roamed Edinburgh, Paris and Amsterdam, busking. Together, they cut an album called ‘First Songs' for a label run out of the Pizza Express on London's Dean Street - a cornerstone venue in Soho's jazz scene.

On the back of that, Gwyneth landed her deal at Universal. "Everyone there was saying to me, ‘Ooh, let's make a jazz crossover record, like Norah Jones and Jamie Cullum'. It didn't work, because it was just a bunch of session musicians in a really expensive studio, playing a load of standards that were chosen quite cynically in some cases. It's all played very well, but it didn't sound like an album."

After the album, 2004's ‘Bittersweet & Blue', her bosses next struck upon the idea of turning her into a poster-girl for Michael Bublé-style swing, and Herbert flew the coop. "I remember thinking," she says, "that there was just no way I was ever going to be able to see this through. Like, I'm going to fall on my arse immediately. I'll make some monumental cock-up, and laugh publicly about it, and that will be the whole illusion shattered. The whole '50s haircut - I just can't do it."

Behind the scenes, Herbert had been writing songs of her own, and, in the fall-out from her record-industry experience, did plenty of soul-searching through her lyrics. "I had this feverish six-month period of just writing and writing. Tom Cawley, who was the piano player in my band at the time, was a really big part of that. He really encouraged me to get it all out, and go out on my own."

In 2006, Gwyneth self-financed three days of recording sessions, with producer Seb Rochford, who, alongside Cawley, is in the jazz-fusion group, Acoustic Ladyland. The idea was to "make a record that was ours", to sell at gigs for people who liked Gwyneth's new material. Thus, ‘Between Me & The Wardrobe' was ‘released', in a very hand-to-hand, cottage-industry manner, through her own Monkeywood Records.

To everyone's surprise, however, Gwyneth's career once again took on a momentum of its own, when, the following year, the album ended up being given a major-label release - via, irony of ironies, Blue Note, the home of jazz. Gwyneth was the label's first UK signing in more than two decades, and, thanks in part to the prestige attached to the Blue Note brand, her music reached further than she possibly could have hoped.

Courtney Pine, for instance, called it a masterpiece. Mojo magazine described it as "Superb music - brilliantly original, full of space and isolated detail." Observer Music Monthly said, "With her bewitching voice, the jazz-folk star was never just your standard covers singer. And here is the proof." The Daily Telegraph, meanwhile, described Herbert as "one of Britain's brightest young talents".

With that success under her belt, Herbert might have looked forward to a fruitful association with Blue Note, and its parent company, EMI. However, like many artists, in harsh economic times, who don't fit a specific mould that marketing men can understand, Herbert found herself again departing a big label, to pursue her music with the creative freedom that Naim Edge offered her.