Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Quartet Bar. 15 Jun 2019
Canada’s SoCALLED is famed for Jewish hip-hop. Going back to his roots, in collaboration with Adelaide’s Zephyr Quartet is easily one of the best things he could have ever chosen to do in his creative life.
SoCALLED brought to his rapt audience in the Quartet Bar a veritable wide history of Yiddish Theatre songs, Holiday songs, Klezmer and more.
The marriage of voice in performance with quartet arrangements is so profoundly affecting. Impassioned urgency, thrusting back and forth in voice and gesticulation is matched with vivid plucked strings and light bow strokes creating an added heart beat to the dramatic, emotional, yet clearly cerebral lyrics.
Never has this famed quartet been seen so in love with the music they were playing. Clearly it had much to do with the wonderful artist leading and guiding them. The material stretched from the early 20th Century, across two world wars to the present; always maintaining a zest for life, for robust self-reflection and cry to action in service of a people, a culture.
So much soul, so much love, so much sombre, heartfelt reflection in one evening always gilded with a tinge of happiness like sparkling gold.
David O’Brien
When: 15 to 16 Jun
Where: Quartet Bar
Bookings: Closed
