Corinne Bailey Rae wanders the stage wordlessly, wafting handheld percussion instruments at amplifiers and members of her band as though burning sage to cleanse the space. All around her is the sound of more percussion and the tentative investigations of a saxophone. She picks up a singing bowl, its sonorous hum cutting through the atmospheric undergrowth, then straps on an electric guitar and begins to sing. The track is called A Spell, A Prayer, and it serves as an invocation. “We long to arc our arm through history,” she intones, “… to unpick every thread of pain.”
For most of her career, Bailey Rae has been known for her breezy soulful hits. Put Your Records On (2006) is forever etched in the collective consciousness, the stuff of perennial smooth hits radio. Mobos and Grammys followed her 4m-selling self-titled debut album, released the same year. This 300-capacity arts space, where she is playing three nights after a run of low-key North American venues, is not where you would expect to find that more starry incarnation of Bailey Rae.
She has, though, long been a more complex artist than her breakout hit suggested. Put Your Records On might be mild-mannered, but it is about female fortitude. It makes mention of loving an “afro hairdo”. Before going solo, Bailey Rae had been in an all-female guitar band, Helen.
Tragedy struck at the height of her success. Her second album, The Sea (2010), processed the sudden loss of her jazz musician husband, Jason Rae. Creeping out six years later, her third album, The Heart Speaks in Whispers, attempted to recapture some of her old music’s ease. But in interviews around her most recent work – Black Rainbows, released in September – Bailey Rae recalled that period as frustrating, one where she was intent on writing pop hits that would not quite come.
Envisioned initially as a side project, this fourth album is a startling artistic about-face; one whose textures and themes strip off the lightweight signifiers that have stuck to Bailey Rae like lint. Tonight, she plays electric guitar and howls; she dances the pain away. The horrors of racism, the complexities of Blackness and the catharsis in anger and joy are all present in a polyphonic set of songs that span distorted riot grrrl punk, slinky retro soul and awestruck meditations that mash genres – although the presence this evening of flute, sax and polyrhythms mostly lands her in a spiritual jazz space informed by outbreaks of house music.
Next up is Erasure, three minutes of scabrous guitar fury – the kind of track that deserves a moshpit but sadly doesn’t get one (it’s not that kind of crowd). On tour in 2017, Bailey Rae came across a museum in Chicago’s South Side. Set up by the multidisciplinary artist Theaster Gates, the Stony Island Arts Bank is an archive that houses the record collection of Chicago house pioneer Frankie Knuckles, a back catalogue of Ebony magazine and a collection of shocking “negrobilia” – household objects depicting Black people in grotesque ways. It’s an ashtray of a Black child’s face Bailey Rae is howling about when she bawls: “They put out lit cigarettes/ Down your sweet throat” as the band churns around her.
Between songs, Bailey Rae explains the origins of each track, as though taking the crowd through the archive: a photograph in Ebony of beauty pageant winner Audrey Smaltz, crowned Miss New York Transit in 1954, was the jumping-off point for the equally punky New York Transit Queen. Peach Velvet Sky – performed by just Bailey Rae and her keyboard-player partner, Steve Brown – imagines how the sky looked to Harriet Jacobs, an enslaved woman who hid in a crawl space for seven years. (Her experiences were published in 1861 as Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.) Bailey Rae’s thumb and finger curl into the shape of the tiny borehole Jacobs carved to see outside, her voice lithe and nuanced.
Gradually, songs are replaced by extended workouts. The spellbinding Before the Throne of the Invisible God is a free-form “sound bath” (Bailey Rae’s words) evoking awe in the face of the ineffable – and the concrete. The song’s inspiration, the church complex of Lalibela in Ethiopia, was carved out of the sandy rock as early as the 7th century – a testament to African technical knowhow. Bailey Rae’s lyrics ponder the seat carved for God in one building, while saxophonist Aaron Burnett’s snaking lines invoke Ethiopian jazz forms.
The night ends on an unnecessary encore of Bailey Rae’s debut single, Like a Star. Although the fans lap it up, the real climax of the show is Put It Down, a pulsating track that, she explains, grew out of a night of dancing at the arts bank in Chicago. Attenders wrote down their innermost torments on a piece of paper and placed them in a bowl. At the end of a night’s raving (with DJ Duane Powell on the decks), the bowl’s contents were set alight.
In the span of about 15 minutes, Bailey Rae’s band move Put It Down from jazz into trip-hop heaviness. Gradually, it unfurls into something else again. A four-to-the-floor beat transforms this genteel hall into a mini jazz rave, with solos from many of the players. Eventually, Bailey Rae hops off the stage and dances in the crowd, celebrating her artistic freedom, as well as the laying down of her woes.