Johnny Boy would have loved it - Sarah Jane Morris' sweet little mysteries

There is an inherent danger to covering the work of a unique artist: there’s good reason, too, why few successfully (or even at all) carry off imprints of music by, say, Bowie or Queen without sounding like a bad Wednesday night in a suburban karaoke club. For fans (and purist fans in particular) of the original performer, the notion of any form of emulation is fraught: too close a copy and you dismiss it as "so what?"; too outré and you creep close to sacrilege.

Riskier still is if the covers are of a deceased legend like John Martyn. Even his own myriad reinterpretations of his greatest songs didn’t always land well, although that was part of his unpredictable appeal - regularly reworking material to suit his mood, be it acoustic, electric, funked-up, reggae-infused, jazz-influenced, or whatever.

His gargantuan, 17-CD posthumous Island Years box set served testament to this, with its plethora of alternate studio takes and live versions which showcased Martyn's restless reinvention - many the result of what touring approach he was taking at the time (i.e. on his own, with mucker Danny Thompson, or with jazz and rock band backing). So step forward bravely, Sarah Jane Morris and her album project Sweet Little Mystery, which brings her incredible contralto voice together with regular guitar collaborator Tony Rémy, along with Tim Cansfield (acoustic guitar), Henry Thomas (bass) and Martyn Barker (drums), to reinvent some of Martyn's songs in a respectful but rarely (if at all) emulatory way. She is not the first to do this, of course: such is Martyn's appeal that plenty have done so before, most famously Eric Clapton's version of May You Never on 1977's Slowhand album that probably - and sadly - did more for Martyn's bank balance than many of his own albums. In 2011, two years after his death, the lovingly-curated compilation Johnny Boy Would Love This produced an eclectic array of tributes from committed fans like Beth Orton, David Gray, The Cure's Robert Smith, Beck, Lisa Hannigan, Paolo Nutini, Snow Patrol, Bombay Bicycle Club, Morcheeba, fellow folkie Judie Tzuke and Martyn's oft-collaborator and pal Phil Collins.

So what does Morris bring to the table? A huge amount, actually. Martyn was labelled many things during his career, largely because he dabbled in many things, but jazz seems to be one of the roots to his canon. Indeed, having started out in the folk clubs of Glasgow, before migrating to London and clubs like 'Les Cousins' (which artists like Martyn, Ralph McTell and others mistakenly thought was named after a bloke called Les Cousins...) he discovered saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders' album Karma, turning him onto modern jazz. From here on in Martyn worked on textures, especially with his voice. "There's a space between words and music and my voice lives right there," he once explained. The album Solid Air, now revered as the godfather of chillout music, and its follow-up One World, could easily have been regarded as jazz, even through the weed-wooze that they conjured. Which is where, kind of, Morris comes in, with a voice that, in her 60th year, is richly reminscent of Nina Simone or Sarah Vaughan. Married to Rémy, Cansfield and Thomas's guitar and bass work, and Barker's understated drumming, it produces corking versions of my Martyn favourites, like Couldn't Love You More, Sweet Little Mystery and I Don't Want To Know.

Picture: Juliet Matthews

In a live performance at London's Purcell Room to launch the album, Morris and band even put in a rollicking version of Solid Air. Given that this song, a paean to Nick Drake, is, in its original form, as stoner-friendly a piece of music as you will find, the brisk and lively application here is refreshingly inventive. Johnny Boy would certainly have loved it. Closer - but not too close - to the original was One World, easily my personal Martyn pick, with its poignant "To take our place in one world, to make our peace in one world" stepping closer to the original, while Fairytale Lullaby (which recently turned up in a particularly bucolic edition of Countryfile) ambled closer still to its foundation, with its now somewhat outdated proto-folk, Arran sweater-wearing, finger-in-ear lyrics about goblins, elves, pixies and "the magic dancing wood". Taken out of that era and the folk club context, Morris delivers it with a playful earnestness.

The entire Sweet Little Mystery project is clearly a work of heartfelt love for Martyn's music by Morris, and in a stage show directed by the comedian and activist Mark Thomas, there are video inserts featuring interviews with Eddi Reader (with whom Martyn collaborated on a TV performance of the southern blues classic He's Got All The Whisky), fellow Glaswegian and cohort Jim McKnight, and Martyn's sister, Julie Ann. Indeed, these three interviews underscored my fascination with the big man himself: Martyn was born on September 11, 1948 in Beechcroft Avenue in New Malden - a 30-minute walk from the house where I was born. As a young boy (then Iain David McGeachy), his light opera-singing parents divorced, with his father taking the five-year-old John to Glasgow, while his mother remained in the Kingston-upon-Thames area. Now, considering that no one famous ever seemed to hail from my neck of the woods, the discovery that my musical hero John Martyn was born a mile or so from where I came into being 19 years later was a revelation. In interviews - few and far between, it must be said - Martyn would skip between broad Glaswegian (increasingly slurred as life's excesses took their later toll) and a more southern English accent. There are videos of him on YouTube performing in the 1970s with what could be considered a Mockney voice. So to see his two worlds collide in these interviews - the obviously Scottish McKnight and Reader, and Martyn's Kingston-raised "little sister" - provides a delightful set of interludes that also reveal the "grace and danger" that not only titled one of his most acclaimed albums (and a band his nephews play in today), but was his trademark.

Few Martyn tributes have ever abstained from referencing his occasionally appalling, substance-driven behaviour. Indeed, the consensus has always been that his 'danger' and self-destructive nature lead inevitably to his untimely demise at the age of 60, ten years ago this year. But I've always chosen to dwell on his grace, the sometimes impossibly, hauntingly beautiful songs like Go Down Easy and Head And Heart that led his first wife, Beverley Kutner, to remark that he put so much emotion into his music that there was rarely anything left for anyone else. Sarah Jane Morris's Sweet Little Mystery captures much of that emotion but, rather than focusing on the sometimes mawkish nature of his music's beauty, brings it to animated life. If only the same could be done for Martyn himself.