With the recent London A Cappella Festival curated by the Swingle Singers featuring acts from around the world including The Magnets, Rajaton, and The King’s Singers, and the enduring appeal of TV series Glee, a cappella has never been more popular in the mainstream. Although the appeal of unaccompanied close harmony singing is pan-genre, with pop and rock, the light classics or even contemporary classical music equally important in terms of repertoire as well as carefully introduced original material, one of the festival’s newer acts this year was six-part a cappella group Vive who are more deeply rooted in jazz than most, and make a point of it, seeing themselves as “re-imagining the close-harmony jazz/spiritual/a cappella sound.”

Vive’s singers include Emily Dankworth, the daughter of leading jazz bassist Alec Dankworth, and was founded by James Rose a year ago. They’re joined by Sam Robson, Ben Cox, Martynas Vilpisauskas and Lewis Daniel. Vive Album released earlier this month was funded via crowdsourced backing on Kickstarter, with money going towards a mixing desk and microphones. The album’s six tracks include an expert take on Leonard Bernstein’s ‘Somewhere’, while a version of Lighthouse Family’s ‘High’ has a suitably vivacious feel. Vive has an overriding jazz pop sensibility strongly hinted at in the original arrangements here, and new material that James Rose and Sam Robson have written. SG