Even after a family bereavement, jazz singer Clare Teal will prove once again why she is one of the industry's ultimate professionals. Chris Price spoke to her.

The term consummate professional is often overused - but it never feels worn out when applying it to jazz singer Clare Teal.

Just days after her father suddenly passed away, the Yorkshire lass was putting on a brave face for this interview ahead of her UK tour. Having left behind her home in Bath to be with her family near Skipton in North Yorkshire, she shrugs her shoulders with a melancholy smile at the situation.

"What you gonna do? I'm just trying to carry on as normal where I can," she said. "I learnt a funny thing about him last night. In interviews its always been his mum's records which have been credited as my inspiration for taking up jazz singing but his oldest friend came round last night and said, 'I've read in these articles that you got all these old records from your nan. I don't suppose your dad pointed out that half of them were mine? So now I have to credit my nan and my dad's friend Michael. He loved what I did for a living and he loved the music that I loved. But you have just got to carry on."

Having signed the biggest ever recording contract by a British jazz singer and achieved mainstream success with her Top 20 album Don't Talk in 2004, Clare was looking for a new challenge with her next record. What she came up with on Hey Ho, her eighth studio album, was something no one had ever done before. She created the Great British Songbook, an album of British music spanning almost 120 years.

"I kind of wanted it to be like the Great American Songbook," said Clare, 38, who also presents her own jazz show on Radio 2. "There is no comprehensive list for British songs so I had to make my own up but being quite geeky about stuff like that I quite enjoyed that.

"Anything made in the 1950s when the charts were going was much easier to research because you can just find the information. Anything before that I had to go to sheet music sales and find out who the writers were and if they were British. I put them in a file and within a month I had 1,000 songs. Of course I had an idea that I wouldn't be doing a cover of Run Rabbit Run so eventually I realised I had 200 contenders and I then whittled those down into what I felt was the Great British Songbook."

Clare actually recorded 30 songs for the record, whittled down to 14 on the album, which will be performed at Maidstone's Pizza Express Music Room. She has fond memories of the venue and has also played at the old Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury. She even applied to go to Canterbury College as a teenager but didn't get in.

"Pizza Express is a favourite place of mine," said Clare. "People who go there love music."

Clare Teal performs at Maidstone's Pizza Express Music Room on Friday, December 9. Doors 7pm. Tickets £28. Box office 0845 602 7017.