Melanie de Biasio at Jazz Cafe, London, gig review: Time-suspending performance is a welcome diversion

She sets out to explore spaces between the notes in her music; pausing languidly over a piano note like fingers over a chocolate box

Roisin O'Connor
Friday 01 July 2016 11:11 BST
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Perhaps it’s part of the magic that Melanie de Biasio weaves; but never has a London audience been quite so hushed.

In the newly refurbished Jazz Cafe she opens on the single track from her upcoming release, ‘Blackened Cities’, a 24 minute epic that weaves seductively through flute solos, shimmering drums and disjointed piano chords.

Her vocals are undulating, celestial even, and really her exquisite voice requires a more intimate venue than this; somewhere with clustered tables, ideally where people sip whisky on the rocks and smoke cigarettes in elegant holders.

Maybe that’s too cliched for her tastes, but here, disruptions like the clatter of a drink being made at the bar and, excruciatingly, the fire alarm going off during ‘Blue’, go some way in disrupting the spell the Belgian artist casts over her audience.

In her sassier moments De Biasio recalls Peggy Lee, snapping fingers and all, and while she seems to eschew such comparisons to such iconic jazz singers, it’s not difficult to make the leap. Then on Nina Simone’s ‘I’m Gonna Leave You’ she throws this attempt to draw parallels right back in your face - making the song her own.

Lauded in traditionalist jazz circles in 2013 for No Deal, she now sets out to explore spaces between the notes in her music; pausing languidly over a piano note like fingers over a chocolate box.

“All we do is work all day long… Nature unveils another way,” she sings on ‘Blackened Cities’, evoking streets emptied of people, where leaves scatter along the pavement and the sun appears, cautiously, over the grey roofs of buildings.

In these turbulent times, this time-suspending performance is a welcome diversion from the incessant chaos that’s rumbling on outside.

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