Hindi Zahra, Jazz Café

I’m not sure what it says about a songwriter when they simply call a song “Music", but the half French, half Moroccan singer Hindi Zahra is a bit of an enigma all round. Critics have already compared the 30-year-old to Billie Holiday and Madeleine Peyroux, presumably because of her phrasing, timbre and a certain fragility in her voice. But her debut album is neither easy listening or jazz. In fact, it’s got more in common with the woozy, trip-hoppy work of Martina Topley Bird, or even the lo-fi experiments with sound that Tom Waits indulges in. The latter aspect being what got my ears paying attention in the first place.

But Hindi plays most of the instruments herself on the aptly named Homemade, resulting in a scuffing-up, lived-in sound which has an intimacy that it’s hard to imagine transferring to a live setting. For example, there’s no drum kit on the album, just Hindi making various percussion sounds which might have been her tapping a table top, shaking a matchbox, or even patting the surface of a body of water (at least that’s what it sounds like to me). So how was this wonderfully idiosyncratic sound going to be reproduced by a band?

Well, Hindi has made the wise decision to start from scratch, and so we got a drummer, keyboardist and two guitarists turning her music into something – for better or worse – far more conventional. Her announcement, early in the set, that “this song’s in Berber” (the language of her country of birth) only got a single whoop from the audience, so immediately it became apparent that she wasn’t performing before the kind of excited partisan crowd I’d seen earlier in the week for the Colombian band Choc Quib Town in the same venue. So Hindi perhaps had more of an uphill struggle winning this crowd over. 

But with her elaborately asymmetrical hairstyle and half a dozen chunky gold bangles on her right arm, she was a striking sight, and fortunately she had a voice to match her bold physical appearance. “Beautiful Tango” has the crackly old wax record sound that Waits likes to occasionally replicate for his songs, but live the buzzy sustain of an electric guitar brings it right up to the present day. And then with “Kiss and Thrills” a soft funk aspect is introduced to the narcotically laid-back studio version, bringing to mind Sade - that is until the guitarist goes off on a Dave Gilmour-like solo prompting Hindi to head-bang manically until her hairstyle loses much of its earlier definition.

The last song of her encore is the previously mentioned “Music”. On the album, it’s an intense track which builds and builds without resort to cliché or obvious rock histrionics. Live it becomes a bit more of a showcase for her band and runs out of steam halfway through. The word occasionally spoken, or inferred, in my ear during the evening is “Well, it’s not world music now, is it?” To which a generous response has to be, "No, but why should it be?" Aren’t we being a little disingenuous to expect someone of Hindi’s – let’s face it – exotic lineage to make an appropriately exotic noise? Instead, she ended up rocking out with a more than competent band to a decidedly enthusiastic response from the Jazz Café audience. So good luck to her with finding an audience in the UK, where we seem more concerned about putting artists into boxes than letting them break out of them.

• Find Hindi Zahra on Amazon