JALEN NGONDA – LIVE: REVIEW
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JALEN NGONDA
Enmore Theatre, March 10
SHUT UP AND feel it grandpa.
No one should try snootily telling the mostly (but not exclusively) twentysomethings audience loving Jalen Ngonda something rotten in a packed Enmore Theatre that what he’s doing is old school. Not because they won’t know this – there is nothing about his songs, his performance, or his sound that could be confused with the 21st-century – but because it doesn’t matter one little bit.
Not when, having finished Give Me Another Day, with its mid-‘60s Marvin Gaye’s smooth groove and trembling falsetto accompanying his dabs of guitar, Ngonda switched to electric piano for the up-tempo early ‘70s club feel of Come Around And Love Me and triggered a minor frenzy on the floor.
Nor when Hannah, What’s The Matter?, one of a handful of songs previewed from his upcoming second album, showed that while the high-and-handsome voiced Ngonda doesn’t do guttural, he and the band can bring enough urgency to make things feel earthy-ish. Let alone when Anyone In Love, a dramatic mid-tempo ballad, had vocal flares sent skywards even as he metaphorically dropped to his knees.
And definitely not when the night began and ended with something of a percussion-led barrio soul feel, emphasising the looser rhythm as well as the impact of this augmented band (keys and percussion added now), compared with the tight and surprisingly full-sounding guitar/bass/drums line-up we saw last year. Yes, even as that encore, If You Don’t Want My Love, just made some of the oldies here think Tammi and Marvin (yes, him again – him a lot actually) should have done this as a duet back in the day.
They didn’t even mind that Ngonda closed the set with two of his weaker, most clearly generic songs, though maybe that was because of the carried-over good feeling from what had immediately preceded them – a moment where his time travel met its contemporary limitations and then soared past them.
After a solo blues in the style of Robert Cray, Ngonda sat at the piano, still alone on stage, and introduced the next number with “this is dedicated to anyone who listens to Burt Bacharach every now and then”, to near perplexed silence. Bert what now? you could almost hear them thinking. But as he began to sing The Look Of Love, his voice ambiguously positioned between Dusty and Dionne, that silence was replaced by growing admiration and excitement.
When it was followed by Mr Train Conductor, another new song that might well have come out of a neighbouring cubicle to Bacharach and Hal David’s in the Brill building, probably destined for The Shirelles, the admiration palpably grew to something like awe. They knew a quality bit of soul pop when they heard it; he offered more than a few slices of it too. Grandpa felt it.
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