Omar and QCBA boogie back to Camden’s reopened Jazz Café

Reopened but with the novelty of distanced tables in its large standing space, one of London’s premier venues takes baby steps towards a post-covid world. This is precisely the kind of gig that is medicinal in every sense of the term. British soul legend Omar has long made music that can lift the spirits as well as impress with its ingenuity, and his meeting with a grade-A jazz quartet co-led by trumpeter Quentin Collins and saxophonist Brandon Allen provides a welcome opportunity to appreciate that. The fact that the set exclusively comprises Omar material written over a thirty-year period makes a strong case for him as a notable original composer as well as a man with a stellar voice. Casting his melodies against a largely acoustic backdrop actually highlights the richness of Omar’s phrasing, with Allen’s rapier flute doubling the second half of couplets and Collins’s lyrical brass floating in tight counterpoint.

Favourites such as ‘The Man’ have a notably lithe swing and a gospel holler thanks to the simmering chords of Ross Stanley’s Hammond organ, though ‘Essensual’ reminds us that Afro-Latin rhythms are a major component of Omar’s music, as befits his longstanding affinity to legends Stevie Wonder and Donny Hathaway. Yet there is a substantial amount of space afforded the band, culminating in an explosive interlude in which drummer James Maddren inventively breaks up a hitherto steady beat and Allen and Collins launch into raucous solos that raise the temperature in the room before everybody settles back down and Omar returns to the familiar ground of pieces such as ‘Syleste’. This deliciously lithe bossa nova is a highlight of his repertoire, and in tonight’s guise the original bass clarinet riff is covered by Allen pushing his low notes to the burr of a baritone.v

Omar brings customary light and shade to the table, with that all-important falsetto as silken as it ever has been, but he also feeds off the energy of the soloists. On the coda of this and other songs he launches into lengthy scat solos that underline the entwinement of jazz and soul that places the likes of John Hendricks, Marvin Gaye and George Benson in one lineage. Omar has his own place in that, above all because the texture of his voice lies in a thought-provoking space between Black Britain, the Caribbean and Black America. He breaks boundaries.  

Omar’s stream of wordless sounds, some throaty and rugged, some airy and refined, brings to mind the singer in his youth, playing a ‘body rhythm’ in which tightly co-ordinated vocal riffs and chest slaps call forth the spirit of a one man barbershop band. As a multi-instrumentalist who has always had an ear for timbres off the beaten track Omar was most probably intrigued by the sight of Alina Bzhezhinska combining solo harp and laptop beats in the first half of the evening, and he also regularly plays synthesizer to produce an additional overlay of rakish funk that gels with the horns. 

Anyway, when things slow right down for the mandatory take on his signature tune, ‘There’s Nothing Like This’ Omar is also astute enough to rein in and let the beauty of the theme speak for itself. Everybody singing along knows this all too well, a wave of nostalgia washing away the misery of a pandemic that has not quite left the scene.