Jarrod Lawson gets soulful at Jazz Café

The healing power of music has often been acclaimed, and the first of Jarrod Lawson’s two nights at the Jazz Cafe offered a touching example: in the audience was a visibly emotional nurse who’d contracted a bad case of Covid. She insisted that her recovery had been down to repeated listening to Jarrod Lawson’s music in her flat.

Hallelujah! But it’s not altogether surprising. Lawson is a singer, composer and pianist whose work is a rich, powerful, life-affirming stew of soul, jazz and R&B. His most recent album, last year’s Be The Change, has been played enthusiastically on radio, but for obvious reasons the man himself was forced to stay home - until now.

The album was always going to be the evening’s focus, but massed voices are the lead instrument, operating like an orchestra in their own right. So how would he reproduce those lush and sophisticated harmonies?

In fact, he didn’t attempt to, and didn’t need to: great songs can survive any treatment, and Lawson’s proved no exception, still sounding terrific in slightly stripped-down form. It also helped that he has a voice of quite extraordinary power and accuracy. He slipped in and out of falsetto with the greatest of ease, and you could hear every word he sang. There was also sweetness, particularly in the song about his fiancée, ‘Evalee’.

He was supported by a fine band consisting of Trent Baarspul (guitar), Chris Friesen (bass) and Brian Foxworth (drums and vocals). Baarspul impressed with his fluid, jazzy runs and contemporary rhythm styles, while Foxworth almost stole the show near the end, leading the crowd-choir on ‘Why Don’t You Call Me Baby Anymore?’

Other highlights included ‘Soul Symphony’, with its subtle use of dynamics, ‘I’ll Be Your Radio’, which sounds like something Prince might have written, and the soaring ‘How Long?’ They also threw in a couple of tunes from Lawson’s first album, as well as a version of the Isley Brothers’ ‘Footsteps in the Dark’. Only one complaint: where was ‘Universal Chord’? For me, that’s the best track on the album.