Kokoroko, Proms Live 2020, Royal Albert Hall, review: the band was delightful, but jazz needs an audience
If there’s one thing more disconcerting than an orchestral Prom in an echoing empty Royal Albert Hall, it’s a jazz Prom. Orchestral players need an audience, but jazz musicians need them more, as it’s the energy of a live audience that fires them up to take risks.
At Monday night’s Prom, there was a moment from the young eight-piece band Kokoroko when one felt the absence of that energy with intense poignancy. They’d just played their opening number, a delightfully easy, flowing piece named Uman underpinned with that characteristic rhythmic complication – a meshing of threes and fours – which the mind finds hard to process but the dancing body understands perfectly well. The horn section at the front made up of trumpet saxophone and trombone kept circling back to the main melody, a three-part chant in an ambiguous mood which we heard a lot of during the set – cheerful, but with a darker note of stoical endurance somewhere underneath.
Eventually, that chant came back as song, when the three players put down their instruments and simply sang. We heard little call-and-response moments between the three, and at one point trombonist Richie Seivwright launched into a solo spot, which seemed just a tad tentative – as they all did, at first. Eventually the energy rose, but at the end of the number it dropped like a stone and a look of sheer bewilderment crossed trumpeter and band-leader’s Sheila Maurice-Grey’s face, as she registered the total silence.
It took only a second for her and the band to recover their poise, and they then went on to give a joyous 70-minute set of numbers from their recent eponymous album together with some older material. Maurice-Grey founded Kokoroko (the word means “be strong” in the West African Orobo language) to revive the West African musical culture which had once been strong in London. But her aim isn’t to peddle an agreeable nostalgic fantasy of West Africa to the world music crowd; she wants to forge something truly contemporary, that will speak to her own people.
The result is something fascinatingly multi-layered and rich. The three-part harmony from Maurice-Grey, saxophonist Cassie Kinoshi and Seivright carried echoes of Sixties West African bands such as Fela Kuti’s Koola Lobitos, as did Tobi Adenaike’s sunlit guitar. But the more urgent electronic-tinged sound of Afrobeat was there too, in the interlocking patterns of drummer Ayo Salawu and percussionist Onome Edgeworth.
The band’s overall sound, with its side-slipping keyboard harmonies from Yohan Kebede and circling bass guitar patterns from Hurcs Atherley brought in a more urgent urban feel, especially strong in the band’s latest release Carry Me Home. A jazz spirit showed itself too in the numerous solo breaks, most impressively in Kebede’s long, harmonically exuberant keyboard introduction to “Age of Ascent”. Here, as in everything else, one became aware of many musical strands being woven into something very distinctive. Kokoroko have already come far, but with such a rich palette to draw on they will surely go further.
Listen to this or any of the 2020 Proms concerts on BBC Sounds or watch on BBC iPlayer until Monday October 12
