Paul Zetter – A Jazz Fantasia Thrills at L’Espace

Mina Agossi Trio, 17/02/2011, L’Espace Auditorium

Mina Agossi is a Force of Nature…

As the excited buzz from the expectant audience intensified and the last seats were quickly taken it was clear there was something afoot. But when the houselights dimmed and an unaccompanied Mina Agossi, with the aid of a crutch, hobbled forlornly onto the red light washed stage, a few expectations must have been clipped (she’d had a recent accident she explained). Launching into an intimate A cappella rendition of Styne and Cahn’s “It’s Magic”, her Billie Holiday-tinged voice with a hint of extra marinade on the vibrato would have reassured some but not all.  But as bassist Eric Jacot and drummer Ichiro Onoe joined her on stage and the crutch was cast aside, we were all suddenly launched into another musical dimension.

Mina Agossi is a force of nature, a one woman jazz fantasia, a living, singing, jazz history lesson. A contemporary original.  Put another way, Mina Agossi did not choose music, music chose her.

Against Jacot’s punched-out bass accents, the opener, the under-recorded “Stoppin’ the Clock”, played with time and bar lines as Agossi careened against the staccato and Onoe’s almost manic off-beats. All a far cry from the Basie’esque version Mark Murphy recorded on the now classic Rah in 1961. The intensity deepened with a favela-flavoured rendition of Jobim’s “Waters Of March”, that Agossi seared with her stunning vocal range and sometimes frenetic phrasing where the ends of words just merged into the next in one sung line. With a well-used loop and delay effects pedal, Jacot was able to set up hypnotic lines which he then layered making the double bass both the harmony provider and root in the piano/guitar-less ensemble.

When you take away the contours a harmony instrument gives you, it’s wonderful how you suddenly re-hear with a new sense of clarity the real woodiness of the bass, the draw of the brush on drum skin and the sonority of a refined voice.

Too much harmony can make you a lazy listener – take it away and it’s harder work to hear the signposts but it can reap rewards when performed with this calibre of musician. At times their trio concept sounded like the great piano-less combos of the 60’s led by the likes of saxophonists Archie Shepp and Albert Ayler and certainly Agossi’s Benin-ese roots added the African strand that was also a dominant attribute. I’m always impressed when a drummer has more different types of stick than drums; who, like Onoe, instead of trying to fill in the remaining gaps just focused on the funk and grind and occasional rat-a-tat flourishes that seemed to always catapult Agossi into another level of performance.

When she started a Chet Baker inspired version of the 1937 Gordon/Revel standard “There’s a Lull in My Life”, by vocalizing Baker’s cool muted trumpet I began to realise that we were indeed in the presence of a special kind of artist – not a chameleon shuffling through different styles, but a re-interpreter of styles where each song gets well and truly Agossi-fied.

By now I had surrendered and joined her on her train so there was absolutely no problem when she segued coolly from a Chet Baker lament to an involved arrangement of Jimi Hendrix’s “Third Stone From the Sun”.  Playfully feeding off the looped bass riff and drum accents and scatting an ethereal imitation of a Hendrix solo, it became a tour de force that stirred the audience and upped the intensity a few more notches. By now, jumping around the 20th century songbook was expected repertoire so when the bass started to walk in Ray Noble’s beautiful 1934-penned “The Very Thought of You”, I stopped taking notes, sat back and let the music take me over.

Sometimes Agossi’s phrasing is so far behind the beat it wouldn’t surprise me if she sometimes finishes one song just as the band are starting the next. It sometimes reminds me of how the great Sheila Jordan used to play with time and of how Bjork can mystify and then bring it home safely.

Next up was a French lyric version of an old Spanish song called “Green Eyes”. As Jacot laid down a guitar-like arpeggio and Onoe playfully rattled two pairs of castanets, Agossi reminded us that even a diva like Piaf was not out of her range. Here she showed the full depth and richness of her voice. In the coda Agossi skillfully brought the volume down, though not the intensity, and transformed into a gentle siffleuse caressing the beautiful nostalgic melody past her lips and culminating in variations of Ravel’s Bolero over the sonorous bass figure. We were all rapt.

So interesting to watch, so comfortable in her own body and with her sidemen, Agossi is a delight to see on stage – a place I suspect is entwined with her DNA. She had taken us seamlessly through favelas, bordellos and the clubs on 52nd Street. We had visited the stage of Woodstock, the shanties of Africa and the West Coast cool. We had been to the borderless, ageless world of Mina Agossi. Whenever she said the word ‘Jazz’ it sounded almost like a threat.
As the second encore came she was still keeping us guessing with that intense almost dangerous twinkle in her eye. I’ve never heard a version of “When The Saints Go Marching In” like that in my life –  how can someone do that hackneyed old song, bring to life the spirit of Louis Armstrong and still sound contemporary and fresh?  Agossi knows.

By the end of the third encore everyone in the audience just kept the standing ovation in place and the trio, by now slumped arm in arm, were singing an old lullaby at the front of the stage.

It was a real moment of audience and performers connected as one. I did notice one person still sitting though. Poor guy, he must have been on crutches.

Some Links

Mina Agossi on My Space
Most of the songs Mina played were off her 2010 release Just Like A Lady reviewed here
A live performance of Third Stone From the Sun with the same trio
Mark Murphy’s classic early 1960s album Rah