Rad Review of Gigs – 28 May 2024
Elaine Mitchener, Cafe Oto, London
Adrian Cross
“The evening culminated in Mitchener bringing together all the night’s musicians and all of them wheeling into free jazz reaching a crescendo from Mitchener that shook Oto’s golden ceiling filaments and had its audience screaming in delight. Powerful, indelible, of an ilk no stranger to Oto regulars, but utterly mesmerising and original and even disturbing for any crossing its threshold for the first time.”
Elaine Mitchener walks on at Cafe Oto wearing a T-shirt with the statement ‘Grace Jones does it better’. This may be true, but Mitchener does it extraordinarily. The glacial, demur Grace Jones would find her exhausting, multi-layered vocal performance fascinating. Technically she can turn her vocal chords to any style with equal panache: soul, opera, jazz, far Eastern tones. Combined with an incredible range of vocal tics and physical contortions she moves seamlessly between melody and discord. She has been awarded an MBE for services to music.
The poems of Afro Caribbean poets, such as Edward Kamau Braithwaite, are channelled on her latest album Solo Throat. She is presented with pieces of paper by some of the other musicians who have performed that night, the contents of which are not explained. They could be lines of poetry to improvise messages or only a visual gimmick, a kind of visual punctuation, metronomy, beat.
The evening began with a striking prose poem on the Windrush arrival from Jay Bernard, his delicate, haunting whistles sampled and harmonised and gradually expanded with the addition of keyboard, bass, flute, piccolo and sax. ‘Someone whistled in 1948, but I’m hearing it now.’
A less interesting piece of poetry from Roy Claire Potter put to sound over the drums of Mark Sanders and violin of Mandihra de Salam followed before Michener appeared with dancer Dam Van Huynh to deliver a startlingly contorted and intense movement performance to a backdrop of piano from Pat Thomas.
The evening culminated in Mitchener bringing together all the night’s musicians and all of them wheeling into free jazz reaching a crescendo from Mitchener that shook Oto’s golden ceiling filaments and had its audience screaming in delight. Powerful, indelible, of an ilk no stranger to Oto regulars, but utterly mesmerising and original and even disturbing for any crossing its threshold for the first time.
Words: Adrian Cross; Photos: Dawid Laskowski