Gig Review: Nala Sinephro At The Barbican
Pure artistry and innovative jazz: Nala Sinephro’s magical night at The Barbican.
It’s a simple set up at The Barbican Hall today. Four musicians, four lights, and almost two hours of escapism. It is that simple and yet all what you need for the music of Nala Sinephro. Releasing her second album ‘Endlessness’ in September, Sinephro showboats her sonic capabilities by diverting from the expected, a run through her album perhaps or a mixture of tracks culminating from her existing projects. Instead, we as the audience are subjected to an expansive affair that sees only three breaks in music as songs built right in front of us.
Joined on stage by Natcyet Wakili on drums, Chelsea Carmichael playing the saxophone and Wonky Logic and Lyle Barton both on synth and key duties, this band of players are a delight to watch in their silent communication with one another throughout the night, a communication that is ushered in by a musical intelligence and kinship formed by playing with one another long enough to learn each other’s language. Just like her album title, the songs are expansive and spaced out, an eagerly enchanted audience watching on in silence as we watch a harp solo be intercepted by the bass of a synth, before a saxophone joins the equation and the soft sound of an Cabalonga shaker transports the sonics into a realm of its own. This is the beauty in Nala’s compositions, the ability to create a landscape with its own story through the varying synth tones, highlighted in solos that round off the end of a track or often bleed into the beginning of another instrument’s journey.
Ambience personified; every moment of silence was curated. Throughout the sprawling 2-hour set, elements of the ‘Continuum’ tracks could be heard in parts, but the performance was ultimately a long wielding quest into the sonic world of Sinephro, harsh synth starts only to be softened by the track’s end.
The three synths as well as the keys on stage have a different role to play, harshness coming Sinephro, Wonky Logic providing the bass, Barton adding to the atmospherics. Carmichael’s saxophone playing has a choral feel whist Wakili on drums carries an energy that acts like a heartbeat to the group.
There is no encore tonight. When Sinephro stops, the bubble we’ve been enclosed in ends as we stand in appraisal for what has been a night of pure artistry and innovative jazz. As we all make our descent out of the venue, a man behind me says to his friend ‘Wow, just magical’, and it’s exactly that. It is hard to shift the feeling of magic for the rest of the night despite entering the cold streets of London imminently afterwards.
Photography By: Nelta Kasparian