When David Groome first met his now wife, Helen, online, she picked up from their chats that he had a love of singing.

“I would send her snippets of me singing, and she’d be like, ‘Oh I love that,’” he says.

“Music seemed to be something that we really clicked on, and the fact that she liked my singing made me feel pretty good.”

He adores jazz and big band music. But he “didn’t have the guts”, he says, to sign up to Jazzeoke, a form of karaoke backed by a live big band until his wife insisted. “She said, ‘Just do it!’”

And for his first performance last Wednesday, with the 30-piece Mordialloc Jazz Orchestra, aka MoJO, Groome sang It Had To Be You , composed by Isham Jones and Gus Kahn, and sung by stars such as Frank Sinatra.

Groome serenaded his wife, who was sitting in the front r

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