Lauren Kinsella, “Somewhere In Between”, Studio Theatre, Library Of Birmingham, 13/10/2015.

The vocalist, composer and lyricist Lauren Kinsella is one of three Jazzlines Fellows appointed in September 2014 by the Birmingham based Jazzlines association with the support of the Jerwood Charitable Foundation. The Jazzlines Fellowship scheme is open to young professional musicians aged 21-35 with the recipients nominated by their peers and by music industry professionals. The three musicians to be awarded Fellowships in 2014 were Kinsella, trumpeter Yazz Ahmed and bassist Chris Mapp. Each has received a year of professional support which has allowed them to develop their careers and to produce new music, with tonight’s performance by Kinsella the second of this year’s Jazzlines Fellowship Showcases, following soon after the presentation of Ahmed’s “Alhaan Al Siduri” suite at the nearby CBSO Centre. 

Born in Dublin Kinsella is now based in London and has established herself as one of the UK’s most adventurous young vocalists and is capable of performing in a number of musical styles. She has led her own group Thought-Fox and is a key component of the superb jazz/avant pop quartet Blue-Eyed Hawk. Kinsella is also a member of trumpeter Laura Jurd’s Human Spirit band and is the featured vocalist with the Chaos Orchestra, a large ensemble featuring some of London’s most promising young musicians. Another song based project with which she is involved is Snowpoet, a duo with bassist and composer Chris Hyson.

An accomplished vocal improviser Kinsella also operates in the free jazz area with collaborations that include a trio with trumpeter Chris Batchelor and pianist Liam Noble plus duos with drummer Alex Huber and pianist Dan Nicholls.

Kinsella’s Jazzlines Fellowship showcase draws together many of her disparate influences in a project called “Somewhere In Between”, the title referencing the ‘liminal’ between the written, sung and spoken word. “Somewhere In Between” takes the words of three prominent contemporary British and Irish poets, Simon Armitage, Maura Dooley and Micheal O’Siadhail, and places them in settings where they are either spoken - by the actor Peter Campion - or played and sung - by Kinsella, cellist Hannah Marshall and drummer/percussionist Mark Sanders. The music embraces both formal structure and all out improvisation – Marshall and Sanders are among the foremost free jazz players on their respective instruments. With Campion sometimes interacting with the musicians it is clear that the project title “Somewhere In Between” is particularly apt and well chosen.

Writing about the project in her programme notes Kinsella explains that literature has always played an important role in her life. Her father owns a second hand bookshop and she has been surrounded by books from a very young age. The literary influence has also inspired her musical work, it’s no coincidence that Blue-Eyed Hawk take their name from a line in a poem by W.B.Yeats and that the group’s début album “Under The Moon” includes a setting of his poem “O Do Not Love Too Long”. The record also incorporates a setting of Seamus Heaney’s “Valediction”.

Tonight’s performance was a collaboration between Jazzlines and the well established Birmingham Literature Festival which is taking place in the city from 8th-17th October 2015 – for the full programme please visit http://www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org
The Festival was centred at the still comparatively new Library of Birmingham and I think I’m correct in believing that this evening was the first time that Jazzlines had hosted an event at the Library’s Studio Theatre. I was impressed by this modern, intimate and comfortable venue and it would be good to see it used for further jazz performances in the future. It’s very close to the Jazzlines base in Symphony Hall and shares bar and toilet facilities with the neighbouring Birmingham Rep.

Kinsella presented the “Somewhere In Between Project” over the course of two sets as she and her ensemble examined the texts of six poems, with two works coming from each of the featured poets. At some point during the course of the evening each poem was both spoken by Campion and sung by Kinsella thereby giving the audience the opportunity to (in Kinsella’s words) “interpret the poetry and music in both an abstract and a concrete setting”. I found it particularly interesting to compare the differences in the rhythms and cadences between Campion’s recitations and the sung/played interpretations of the musical ensemble.

The first set began with Campion, an Irish born actor best known for his portrayal of the character Packy in the TV series “London-Irish”. His reading of Armitage’s “An Accommodation” was more of a monologue than a conventional poetry reading but the poet’s words lend themselves to that approach anyway (videos of Armitage, the best known poet of the three, himself reading the work in this style are readily available on line). The poem itself depicts an estranged couple living separate lives in a divided house, the demarcation line being a thin net curtain suspended between them. It’s subtly nuanced and finely detailed and blends comedy with pathos. I enjoyed the reference to the Husker Du CD which was on the wrong side of the ‘net’ from the protagonist’s point of view – Bob Mould can do no wrong as far as I’m concerned. However I also have to say that the poem also reminded me of that episode of Steptoe & Son when Albert and Harold partitioned the house between themselves!

I’m no theatre buff but I was impressed with Campion’s performance throughout the evening as he invested each piece with just the right amount of emotion. His performance of “An Accommodation” was spot on in the manner of its deadpan, occasionally hesitant delivery. Throughout the evening he spoke from memory rather than reading the poems and with his subtle hand gestures and utilisation of the performance space his contribution was both compelling and convincing. 

When Campion had finished the attention shifted to the always watchable Sanders who began the musical part of the performance with a passage of unaccompanied drumming which saw him deploying his trademark small cymbals, woodblocks and other items of small percussion in addition to his conventional drum kit. In time Kinsella added her voice to the proceedings, combining effectively with the dark, grainy sound of Marshall’s cello. Kinsella is a vocalist who has mastered the experimental techniques pioneered by Julie Tippetts, Maggie Nichols and others and wordless improvising was a key part of tonight’s performance as she deployed extended vocal techniques alongside the eerie sound of Sanders’ bowed cymbals. Despite her willingness to stretch the limits of the human voice Kinsella remains innately musical and is also an excellent singer of melodies . When required she is capable of bringing a warm, pure, folk like timbre to her singing, something which served her well this evening.

Not being familiar with the poems beforehand and without the benefit of them being reproduced in the programme it wasn’t always easy to pick out the demarcation lines in what was essentially an uninterrupted performance. The repertoire included Dooley’s “Our Lives And Ourselves” and O’Siadhail’s “Friendship and “Spirit Of A Language”.

Easier to identify were Campion’s reciting of Dooley’s “The Weighing Of The Heart” and the musical ensemble’s interpretation of Armitage’s darkly comic “Last Words”, a horrific tale about a woman dying from a bite from a spider concealed within a box of fruit & veg. This gave Kinsella the opportunity deliver some extreme vocalising alongside the sounds of Marshall’s cello, alternately bowed and plucked, and Sanders’ always colourful and imaginative drums and percussion.

Taken as a whole the first set was far from being an easy listen but it was never less than interesting and was often strangely compelling.

Perhaps because I had grown to acclimatised to Kinsella’s methods by now I found the second half of the performance even more absorbing. It began with a stunning piece of solo cello improvisation from Marshall with bowing that ranged from the deeply sonorous to the startlingly high register. She was eventually joined by Sanders whose mallet rumbles accompanied Kinsella’s singing of (I think) O’Siadhail’s “Friendship”, a piece that had been intoned by Campion in the first half. The actor, seated, was lost in reverie throughout the trio’s performance of this piece.

An engaging cello and drum/percussion dialogue presaged the trio’s interpretation of Dooley’s “The Weighing Of The Heart” before Campion delivered Armitage’s “Last Words” as a monologue. Inevitably the dark humour spider’s tale lost a little of its impact as we had already heard it from Kinsella and her musicians.

A further dialogue between Marshall and Sanders which included some aggressively plucked cello preceded Campion and Kinsella speaking/singing together in perfect sync on O’Sidhail’s “Spirit of a Language” (again I’m guessing, the darkness in the Studio Theatre plus the lack of familiarity with the texts made note taking difficult).

The performance concluded with Kinsella, Marshall and Sanders performing “An Accommodation” and thus bringing the evening full circle.

All in all this had been an intriguing evening of music and poetry and while this is not an entirely new concept it was still a performance that served to confirm what an adventurous performer Kinsella is. With a greater reliance on improvisation it was very different to Yazz Ahmed’s through composed suite “Alhaan Al Siduri” but in its own way it was equally successful. With so many identi-kit standards singers around it’s good to see vocalists like Kinsella taking risks and striving for something different.

My thanks to John Watson who reviewed this concert for Peter Bacon’s Jazz Breakfast website and also provided the superb photograph that accompanies this review. John’s review pointed out the fact that Kinsella chose to sing from a seated position for the whole of the performance and he felt that she should have stood up and generally projected herself more. I’ll admit that I wasn’t particularly noticing of this at the time but John does make a very valid point. However it could have been that Kinsella didn’t want to clash with the charismatic Campion so I’m prepared to give her the benefit of any doubt. 

Chris Mapp’s Jazzlines Fellowship showcase events are as follows;

Chris Mapp’s Gonimoblast w. Maja Ratkje @ The Crossing, South and City College, Digbeth, Birmingham.
Thursday, November 26, 2015.

Chris Mapp’s Gonimoblast w. Arve Henriksen @ The Crossing, South & City College, Digbeth, Birmingham
Friday, November 27, 2015.

Please visit http://www.thsh.co.uk for further details