Music / soul jazz
Review: Zara McFarlane/Thabo, Fleece
Sometimes a support act can take you by surprise. I hadn’t even registered there was another name on the bill until I got to the Fleece and ‘Thabo’ meant nothing to me. The simple set-up of vocal mike and keyboard was unassuming enough, but as soon as Thabo came on stage with accompanist Aron Kyne some kind of warmth entered the room.
Thabo – utterly sincere
His songs were well-written, socially conscious and clever, his delivery artlessly clear, his voice sweetly soulful and utterly sincere. The piano accompaniment was beautifully worked around the songs, richly harmonised and atmospheric. It was mesmerising and, however much the crowd was anticipating the headliner, there was genuine disappointment when Thabo’s unexpected set ended. Hopefully he’ll be back.
There was to be no disappointment when Zara McFarlane took to the stage, however, with a classy four-piece band that included long-time collaborator Peter Edwards on piano and sax star Binker Golding alongside Jay Dawlish’s bass and Sam Jones drumming. As her latest album Arise captures, Zara has perfectly distilled her musical heritages of reggae, gospel, soul and jazz into a vocal style that can float across any or all of those styles. This makes for a freshness as genres blend around her, as when Jay Dawlish’s Mingus-style bass solo introduced a sweeping jazz ballad. The song turned out to be reggae classic Police and Thieves, with deeply soulful vocals emphasising the lyric’s social commentary. Even more transfixing was The Congos’ Fisherman, slowed down and swathed in an almost anti-reggae mix of soft drumming, swooping bowed bass and simple piano arpeggios.
is needed now More than ever
These were calming moments in a high energy set, however, and original songs like Angie La La made for a fine jazz workout, the drumming increasingly liberated as Binker Golding’s blistering sax solo revealed the virtuosity at his fingertips. Similarly, Feed The Spirit swung along with fast bopping vocals laced with bursts of scat and a thrumming walking bassline and the tidy minimalism of Allies or Enemies with just bass guitar, sketchy electronic percussion and sampled vocals provided the singer with a nice exercise in vocal timing.
Throughout the set what was evident was that, like the best jazz vocalists, Zara McFarlane was a musical part of the band, albeit a central part. Her evident appreciation in the way each song developed onstage and her well-judged confidence in vocalising during the instrumental moments gave a strong sense of collectivity, unleashed in a proper jazzed-up encore where everybody got to let their hair down. This whole evening was a fine example of musical intelligence enlisted in the cause of great entertainment.
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