Nala Sinephro put out one of my favorite albums last year, and considering how rarely I see live jazz, this show was an immediate priority for me. On top of that, she played in the Kammermusiksaal of the Philharmonie, a well-designed, modern venue with nice seats.
[Pictures were not allowed during the performance, so here’s the harp tuner.]
Despite my enthusiasm, I had no idea what to expect. After some delays, Sinephro and three bandmates came out. She went straight to her harp and played solo at length. I was already captivated; she played flawlessly and beautifully. Eventually she looked up and nodded to Lyle Barton (operating a synth bass rig) and a drummer who’s name I didn’t catch. I think it was Moses Boyd but might’ve been either of the drummers who played on the album (Natcyet Wakili or Morgan Simpson) or someone else entirely. They started playing simple parts at a low level and I could feel the energy slowly building. Eventually Nubya Garcia started some slow blows on her sax, more breathy air than harmony, and around the same time Sinephro pushed away the harp, got up, and sat down at her synth rig (a Prophet ’08 with a modular bay on the side). And from there, things really picked up.
They improvised in total for around 45 minutes without a break. It was transcendent. Sinephro stayed at the synth for the rest of the jam, modulating an arpeggiator just about the entire time. She was a deft manipulator of the knobs and kept introducing subtle shifts in tempo, tone, pitch, and effects, guiding us gently but firmly on an expansive journey. The drummer underpinned the rises and falls of the mood, heavily resting on beds of cymbals with shocks of snare for intermittent energetic bursts. Garcia’s sax started as merely texture, but she gradually warmed up to greater and more aggressive attacks as well. She also used effects pedals to wash her instrument’s rough edges out and grant it shimmering trails. Barton’s synth mostly faded into the background, merely underpinning the others’ more expressive performances. But near the end, as Sinephro cut back some of her layers and signaled to Garcia and the drummer to fade out, Barton’s synth stepped up and took a leading role, wildly oscillating in higher registers. I recognized the tone and style from several of the songs on Endlessness. And then, ever so slowly, they too faded out.
After just a brief pause for applause, they started over, again with Sinephro alone at the harp. In fact, they followed almost the exact same pattern. The order of the instrumentation was about the same, as was the general arc of the energy levels. They again improvised for around 45 minutes. The second jam was just as good as the first, only losing some marks due to the familiarity of the format. And after that, Sinephro said thanks, and they left.
I loved the juxtaposition of the serene harp with the wilder, freer synth exploration. I thought I recognized a few motifs from the album, but the structure was much looser and more open than those individual songs. I was amused to see Sinephro occasionally give direction to her bandmates, to which the drummer typically responded rather abruptly. I would’ve expected a more gradual transition, but it wasn’t exactly jarring. There were just a few moments where Sinephro’s synth had some rough transitions where the effects misaligned and caused a brief dropout or a nasty noise, but those were infrequent and quickly recovered from. Otherwise, they performed at an impressively high level.
Score: A
Thanks to Alyssa!
