music hall month, part 2
Jul. 12th, 2003 01:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jfbThe opening act tonight was Ledisi, a very talented soul singer who had pulled out all the stops by the time I got inside and didn't appear to know how to push any of them back in. This is a fine approach--it gets people up and moving, a worthy goal--but it just shouldn't be applied to "Yesterday," in which she sounded so excited at the memory of all her troubles having seemed so far away that it was impossible to reconcile her performance with the song itself. Her vocal prowess undermined the song instead of supporting it.
As a singer, Meshell Ndegeocello is in some ways the opposite. She never seems to risk straining her vocal chords. Her singing is almost free of the flights of melisma that characterize so much contemporary pop-R&B singing. But her voice has a calm strength, harnessed by an intelligence that invests every syllable with emotional weight. It doesn't hurt that her music is eclectic and marked by experimentation, or that her lyrics have a strong political and philosophical grounding.
I'll confess that her latest album hasn't yet grabbed me. I blame myself. I was hoping for a synthesis of her early funk/hip-hop work and the acoustic introspection of Bitter; I was really looking forward to it. What I heard was, well, something else again, and I didn't give it many chances to tell me what it was. So that could be why I only recognized a song and a half tonight. But she apologized at one point for playing so many new songs, so I think instead what we were hearing was a preview of the next album, which I'm now excited to hear.
If tonight's set is representative, she's nearly excised hip-hop from the palette this time around (no turntables that I noticed; very little rapping), and she's pulled in a strong reggae influence, mixed with the funk-pop that's been present in all her albums. Neither of these is in itself good or bad, but the songs were all good, and they flowed together well. Something to look forward to. Meanwhile, I'm giving Cookie another spin.
Between sets, I was hassled by a friendly drunk about my decision to bring a book (Burning Chrome) and read it in the intermission. "Does it ever occur to you to start a conversation with someone?" "No," I explained. "I'm not much of a talker." It would have been more accurate, I think, to say that in a room as noisy as the one we were in, I couldn't say or hear anything true. But not more effective.
We all have our failings, and this difficulty with casual conversation is one of mine. If we're lucky, we figure out ways to work on some of them, and work around others. In the last few years, I've chipped away at some of the social discomfort that underlies a lot of my problems. But socializing at concerts is a battle I haven't chosen to fight, and being reminded of it was kind of a jarring note in a night I was out to enjoy.
As a singer, Meshell Ndegeocello is in some ways the opposite. She never seems to risk straining her vocal chords. Her singing is almost free of the flights of melisma that characterize so much contemporary pop-R&B singing. But her voice has a calm strength, harnessed by an intelligence that invests every syllable with emotional weight. It doesn't hurt that her music is eclectic and marked by experimentation, or that her lyrics have a strong political and philosophical grounding.
I'll confess that her latest album hasn't yet grabbed me. I blame myself. I was hoping for a synthesis of her early funk/hip-hop work and the acoustic introspection of Bitter; I was really looking forward to it. What I heard was, well, something else again, and I didn't give it many chances to tell me what it was. So that could be why I only recognized a song and a half tonight. But she apologized at one point for playing so many new songs, so I think instead what we were hearing was a preview of the next album, which I'm now excited to hear.
If tonight's set is representative, she's nearly excised hip-hop from the palette this time around (no turntables that I noticed; very little rapping), and she's pulled in a strong reggae influence, mixed with the funk-pop that's been present in all her albums. Neither of these is in itself good or bad, but the songs were all good, and they flowed together well. Something to look forward to. Meanwhile, I'm giving Cookie another spin.
