China Moses, Laura Mvula and Corinne Bailey-Rae make Mississippi Goddam! dazzle at Southbank

Forgotten lyrics saved by a scat solo in the heat of the moment. This was Ni Maxine proving that there is a real tightrope to walk every time an improvising musician is on stage, for when the verse of ‘Four Women’ slipped her mind an artful wordless vocal, left her mouth, triggered by creative reflexes duly honouring Ella Fitzgerald’s famous 1960 salvage of ‘Mack The Knife’.

In this emotionally charged tribute to Nina Simone Maxine’s passing fall and rise added a sharp edge to the timeless tale of black female solidarity as the singers who stood next to her, Laura Mvula, Corinne Bailey-Rae and China Moses (pictured above), appeared to will her on to triumph. The reprise of the song in the encore, with no attack of nerves, underlined as much. Simone herself, who appeared on a giant screen at the start of proceedings, may have been charmed, or indeed irked by the poor sound that plagued the first half of the concert, as the balance of the strings and horns of the expanded Nu Civilisation Orchestra conducted by Peter Edwards was not quite right, and the subtleties of the final vocalist Tony Njoku were occasionally swallowed up on an otherwise soulfully appealing glide through ‘I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free’, a Civil Rights anthem that has lost none of its relevance today.

With superior soloists such as saxophonist Denys Baptiste, flautist Rowland Sutherland, pianist Sarah Tandy and trumpeter Mark Kavuma in its ranks, the NCO is a Grade-A ensemble, and the instrumental arrangements of ‘African Mailman’ and ‘Sinner Man’ underlined the skill with which the ensemble bridged jazz, gospel and classical, as did Simone in her unique career. That said, the singers excelled at times. Sat at the piano Mvula was bewitchingly fragile on ‘Little Girl Blue’, while Bailey-Rae cast her precise, soaring high notes against a lush bed of cellos on ‘Feeling Good.’

Yet it was the viscerally bluesy holler of Moses that conveyed the righteous anger that fuelled many of Simone’s greatest works. The roaring defiance hit a peak on ‘Mississippi Goddam!’, a protest song for the ages.