Lounge duo F&B on their debut album: ‘The music just flows. There’s trust between us’

Regular gigs at Dubai's Bar 44 led the duo F&B – singer Flory Tuchel and pianist Bobby Valchev – to lay down eight original tracks that will feature in their debut album Stereotype.

Flory Tuchel, left, and Bobby Valchev. Antonie Robertson / The National

In the improvised world of jazz, creativity can creep up anywhere – and often when you least expect it.

Lounge duo F&B, made up of singer Flory Tuchel and pianist Bobby Valchev, were playing a regular gig at Dubai’s vertiginous Bar 44 – the latest in that long string of hotel residencies that make up the life of a professional musician – when lightning struck.

Playing night after night, in familiar, safe surroundings and to an affluent crowd, the musicians started to stretch out, and relax. Soon they found they were ­improvising whole songs on the bandstand.

Many of these jams form the basis of their debut album ­Stereotype, a collection of eight original tunes showcasing the duo's talents far beyond any corporate covers gig, which will be launched with a concert at Dubai arts hub The Fridge on Monday.

“As musicians and artists, you get to improvise and create on the stage,” says Tuchel. “These original songs just started coming, it was totally unexpected.”

The Romanian singer took to recording these one-off live jams on her iPad – moments that would otherwise be lost – and three tracks are direct transcriptions of what was created on the ­bandstand.

“It just happened naturally,” she says. “We were shocked – I thought if we don’t record these songs, they will be lost forever. Because they happen one time only.”

That first burst of creativity came in late 2013, when they had already clocked scores of gigs together. It was, at first, a marriage of convenience, thrust together in early 2012 to perform for a rowdy brunch crowd at Jumeirah Zabeel Saray. The name F&B was a canny in-joke – standing for Flory and Bobby, rather than food and beverage.

“We hit it off from day one,” says Tuchel. “The music just flows. There’s trust between us – it’s like we were born from the same mother.”

Of course, both had put in the ample groundwork of any professional musician. The 40-year-old Tuchel was, in her own words, a “sort of famous” singer in her native country. She appeared on TV and won Romania’s national Mamaia Music Festival talent search in 2004, three years after arriving in the UAE to pursue the life of a ­gigging musician.

The 33-year-old Bulgarian Valchev, arrived in the UAE from London in 2011, the latest stop in a career that has seen him jam alongside jazz legends George Benson, Marcus Miller and Billy Cobham, and work as a musical director for Claude J Woods Jr, who toured with the Earth Wind & Fire Experience.

Both musicians hold jazz as their first love. But after years on the corporate circuit – together clocking more than 100 shows at many of the UAE’s most prestigious hotels, including Emirates Palace and Burj Al Arab – F&B are equally adept at catering for market demand.

This lends their own music a refreshing dexterity – Stereotype mixes lounge funk, big band blues, retro jazz ballads, bossa nova grooves and even touches of country into a set that is never less than easy on the ears, the core duo augmented by bass, drums, brass, guitar and even a string quartet.

Lyrically, Tuchel – who ranks Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone and Amy Winehouse among her biggest influences – claims each song was inspired by a different person who has touched her life in some way.

"The ideas come to me out of the blue, when I least expect it," she says. The lyrics to the album's title track, Stereotype, came while brushing her teeth one morning, and pondering what to wear. The song explains how Tuchel feels that whatever outfit she chooses will somehow conform to a particular stereotype.

“It’s like somebody knocks me in the head with an idea,” she says, “and I have to record it right then, or it will be lost.”

• F&B launch Stereotype live at The Fridge, Alserkal Avenue, Al Quoz, Dubai on Monday, May 9 from 7pm; tickets cost Dh50. For more information, visit www.fandbmusic.wix.com/mysite