Kate Daniels, the unflashily illuminating British jazz and folk singer, shared her highly personal songbook with guitarist John Etheridge at a charity gig for Music Lighting a Beacon, which works with refugees.
The gravity of the Calais mission was made plain in some telling speeches, but Daniels, Etheridge, bassist Alec Dankworth and violinist Richard Jones embraced the agenda without letting it curb the skittishness of touch with which they massaged timeless songs from all over the world.
Daniels swiftly took in Bob Dylan, Jacques Brel, the Great American Songbook, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a Hebridean lament and plenty more. She was a little subdued alongside her ruggedly swinging partners on I Thought About You, but coolly witty in a Trump-updated recitation of Ferlinghetti’s Dog. While Etheridge snapped out squirming fills, Dankworth was typically dark-toned and rhythmically supple on Devil May Care, and Daniels’ empathy with country music was audible everywhere in Dylan’s I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight. Brel’s powerful Amsterdam was an ominously accelerating waltz, and violinist Richard Jones wrapped spine-tingling chordal drones around Daniels’ sliding grace notes in a Gaelic lament. The Russian traditional Moscow Nights (an unlikely 60s hit for trad-jazzer Kenny Ball), and Django Reinhardt’s Nuages were delectable ballad-singing performances – the latter empathically shadowed by Etheridge in exquisite Reinhardt mode, and dedicated to a Daniels heroine, the late and underrated jazz-vocal original Susannah McCorkle. It was a classy evening of song-cherishing internationalism.
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