A talent to Listen for

Natasha Panas is a Sade-ishly smooth jazz-, soul- and blues-influenced singer-songwriter with a startling backstory. Her Warsaw-born grandmother, Ruth Altbeker Cyprys, escaped the Nazis with Panas’s mother, then two years old, by cutting through the bars of a train truck heading for Treblinka concentration camp.

“She was a strong and resourceful lady,” says Panas, who has something of her grandmother’s force of character, acquired from years on the cabaret circuit. “She kept a hacksaw in her boot.”

Cyprys told her tale in the biography, A Jump For Life. It was published in 1994, but Panas could not bear to read it until 1997, while in Milan on her “year abroad” during a music and Italian degree. “It was overwhelming,” she reveals. “It also made me wonder about my identity and my destiny.”

Because of her mother, she was Jewish, and yet her father was a Greek-Italian who was born in Ethiopia and grew up in the Belgian Congo. And, besides, after the war, her grandmother shunned Judaism “because she thought admitting she was Jewish was asking for trouble”. Confused, she arranged a meeting with Milan’s chief rabbi.

“He was hysterical,” she recalls. “Rabbis are some of the funniest people on the planet - they’ve all got that same laconic tone of voice. It was funny hearing an Italian one with the same inflection. He said: ‘Why are you here?’ I explained to him, and he asked: ‘Is your mother Jewish?’ So I told him, and he said: ‘Don’t worry, you’re a Yid!’”

Although Panas is, like Rachael Sage, in her thirties, she is about to release her first album, Yellow Flowers. But her CV is far from empty - she performed at Stringfellows nightclub in London when she was 16, and has toured as backing vocalist with everyone from Vanessa Mae to Ms Dynamite. She has dabbled in the world of soulful house with a friend who calls her “the piano bitch with the perfect pitch”.

She even recorded an album and played some shows with Harper Simon, son of the legendary Paul, and his band Menlo Park. “Those were the craziest gigs I’ve ever done,” she laughs. “They were at the Masonic Temple in London. There was a guy wearing a wolf’s head and a girl with a bird’s head at the door, and everyone else had on cloaks and masks. I was alone on the makeshift stage, draped over a throne. It was nerve-wracking: Paul Simon was there.” What did he make of it? “I don’t know - he was wearing a mask.”

Yellow Flowers is titled after an Italian friend, “a traffic-stoppingly beautiful girl” who died in a car crash 10 years ago. “It was a massive shock - the first time I lost someone I was close to.”

The album was produced by Paul Simm, who has worked with Sugababes and Amy Winehouse. It features vocal contributions from David McAlmont. On it, Panas explores themes of “love lost, loneliness and disillusionment”.

But it is not all despair. “There are some really happy songs on there,” she reassures. “I’m multifaceted,” she adds. “I can be really loud, which is understandable coming from Jewish, Greek and Italian stock, but I’m prone to melancholia, a result of spending so much time alone, writing and performing.”

There is a track called Ah Satan - so is she a bad girl on the quiet? “Ah Satan - that’s my name backwards!” she explains.

“It’s about when you do things and you know they’re a bit naughty, but you have this devil on your shoulder. Not that I do naughty things… although I have driven through the odd red light.”
Natasha Panas (www.natashapanasmusic.com) is performing at Pizza on the Park, London SW1 on July 31, the same day her album, Yellow Flowers, is released (www.pizzaonthepark.co.uk).

From The Jewish Chronicle