Georgia Mancio and Alan Broadbent
A Story Left Untold
A young woman was waiting tables at Ronnie Scott's club in London .......
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Georgia Mancio's Italian parents met and married in the UK and Georgia was born in England, so she is presumably Anglo-Italian - "though I just prefer to say European these days!", she says. Her father was a technical translator but also an artist and photographer, and her mother a retired Italian language and literature teacher. Georgia studied classical flute for a while although she really wanted to sing, but her grandparents, both classical pianists, suggested she should take time for her voice to mature. Taking their advice, she didn't start singing until she was nineteen and singing seriously when she was twenty three. By then she had become hooked on recordings by great vocalists such as Sinatra, Betty Carter, Carmen McRae, etc. She learned their songs by heart and took note particularly of the way they expressed their music. Eventually, Georgia left home and went travelling. On her return, as she told Jazzwax, "I wound up studying film-making while waitressing part-time at Ronnie Scott's jazz club in London. Ronnie's was the best schooling. In my five years there, I heard the finest international and local musicians. I also learned that art was a living, breathing, sweating, messy, ugly, beautiful thing, not just the stuff of records, movies and dreams. Over the years, I learned to sing on the job, with answers to my questions provided by listening to inspiring musicians."
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"When I worked at Ronnie’s, Simon Woolf recommended I listen to Irene Kral as I was just starting singing. That led me to the sublime duo albums she made with Alan Broadbent. In 2012, I sent Alan an email asking if he ever wanted to do any UK gigs with a singer totally unknown to him! That led to some duo gigs the following year and later the start of our songwriting partnership.’
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With their first album together, Songbook, Alan suggested that Georgia write lyrics for a tune by Charlie Haden's Quartet West The Long Goodbye. It coincided with Georgia’s final visit to her father’s house and became ‘The Last Goodbye’ on the album – a subtly emotional story of loss and coming of age
Alan Broadbent is recognised as a leading American jazz pianist, composer and arranger with credits as impressively far-ranging as Diana Krall, Natalie Cole, Woody Herman, Johnny Mandel, Paul McCartney, Chet Baker, Warne Marsh, Bud Shank, and iconically Irene Kral and Charlie Haden’s Quartet West. Alan was born in New Zealand where he studied piano and music theory, but he then moved to America in 1966 to study at the Berklee College of Music. He became Natalie Cole's pianist and conductor and his arrangement for her video When I Fall in Love won the Grammy Award for 'Best Orchestral Arrangement Accompanying A Vocal'. Another Grammy Award followed for his arrangement of Leonard Bernstein's Lonely Town on a recording by Shirley Horn.
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Alan has said : "Every once in a while, melodic inspirations would pop into my head uninvited, expressing my inner feelings with just notes and chords but without words. That is, until they met Georgia Mancio. She has the same love for song as I do and knows the language they need to speak to the heart. She also found, word for word, note for note, solutions to my sometimes enigmatic titles and gave life to the sentiment they implied.”
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But Georgia is in the UK and Alan in America. How do they work together? Georgia described the process during the Covid pandemic: "Well obviously it’s not the most convenient in terms of playing and sometimes I wish we could just go through songs together. But I guess what the geographical set up has done, is inadvertently focus the songwriting. It allows each of us the space to work on our part so that we create a stronger statement when we join them together. And because we are used to working remotely, we have not only been less affected by this last year, it’s actually been a really productive time." Their next album, Quiet Is The Star, was released in 2021. Here is an introductory video for the album.
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Both Alan and Geogia have their own individual successful careers and Georgia records and sings with a variety of bands and musicians - here she is singing Give Me The Simple Life at Chichester Jazz Club in January this year (2025).
.... and here is Alan directing his composition Bebop And Roses with the WDR Big Band in 2024 as part of the concert “The Birth Of The Cool Kind Of Blue” at the Kölner Philharmonie in May.
..... but In 2023 they had the opportunity to get together again accompanied by Georgia's regular bass player, Andrew Cleyndert and drummer Dave Ohm. Their album, A Story Left Untold, celebrating their decade working together, is released this month (May 2025). Alan says: "I have to stress that Georgia does not add one syllable to my notes. Perhaps this is what is meant by inspiration requiring structure and discipline in order to aspire to art. Georgia expresses these qualities in everything we've created together .... Her words sound like my notes: they are meant to be sung ..." Georgia adds: "I tried to capture, in words, the sweep of Alan's stunning sound world and the depth of history and humanity woven through it ...". Here is a video introduction to the album.
Georgia and Alan are touring the UK in April and May. It is a rare chance to catch this successful song-writing partnership. The May dates are shown on the video and on Georgia's website here.
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A Story Left Untold is available from 5th May on Bandcamp where you can sample three of the tracks (here). The lyrics to the title song, recorded with FAME's Skopje Studio Orchestra, reflect the stories hidden in the history of the land, but the title should also apply to those songs that are hopefully still to come from Georgia and Alan.
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