The soulful protest song has proved difficult to master but easy to parody. Even the classics are problematic: Billie Holiday’s desiccated, tuneless, unswinging Strange Fruit is easier to admire than love; Prince’s Sign O’ the Times and the Stylistics’ People Make the World Go Round are filled with reactionary gibberish; while Timmy Thomas’s Why Can’t We Live Together and Marvin Gaye’s Mercy Mercy Me string together laughably vague platitudes. It’s what made Flight of the Conchords’ Think About It such a satisfying pastiche.
Fortunately, tonight’s celebration of the protest song, led by singer Carleen Anderson and featuring performance poet Speech Debelle, manages to avoid the cliches, choosing a broad selection of political anthems and, with the help of a remarkable house band, transforming them into compelling art.
As well as the secular gospel tunes you might expect – by the likes of Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye, Gil Scott-Heron and Nina Simone – there were less familiar anthems. The most recent is Brandi Carlile’s The Joke, a country-rock ballad about schoolchildren being bullied for their sexuality and gender identity, which is turned into a reggae-tinged requiem of defiance. The oldest is Woody Guthrie’s shambolic dustbowl ballad I Ain’t Got No Home, which becomes an elegant duet for voice and piano: pianist Nikki Yeoh’s baroque accompaniment is filled with sly references to Donny Hathaway’s A Song for You, while Anderson’s remarkable voice starts like a bassoon and ends up sounding like a piccolo.
It’s something that the Houston-born, Bristol-based Anderson manages to do throughout the evening – shifting effortlessly from growling contralto to dog-whistle. Not content with her remarkable three-octave range, Anderson occasionally uses a Jacob Collier-style vocal harmoniser that allows her to “sing” the unusual harmonies she plays on her keyboard. It has a wonderfully unsettling effect on well-worn civil rights anthems, transforming Sam Cooke’s A Change Is Gonna Come and Odetta’s gospel classic Oh Freedom into eerie Afro-futurist chorales.
The other star frontwoman tonight, performance poet Speech Debelle, starts shakily: her clumsy phrasing rather ruins Gil Scott-Heron’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (it would be more interesting to hear her thoroughly update the lyrics, rather than stumble through unfamiliar 50-year-old references to Spiro T Agnew and The Beverly Hillbillies). But she redeems herself with an imperious version of No War No Peace, with drummer Rod Youngs providing a thunderous Afrobeat rhythm, and a swaggering original called Hip Hop.
London tenor saxophonist Nubya Garcia opened the show with a reading of John Coltrane’s Alabama – a melody that Coltrane famously based on the sorrowful intonations of a Martin Luther King speech about the Ku Klux Klan bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama. Garcia plays with a calm authority and an engaging tone, occasionally building to a compelling freakout, and it’s a pity that she didn’t get more space tonight.
But this was a fine team effort. Nina Simone’s Four Women became a slow-burning funk prowl that built to a sensational climax, with Yeoh thumping the hell out of a Steinway grand; while a hard-grooving version of Marvin Gaye’s Inner City Blues was transformed by an audacious switch in register. This wasn’t just about self-affirming platitudes: it was a performance that often exploited the unsettling aspects of the protest song, finding musical depths few others have located.
