When Mavis Staples opens her mouth, remarkable things happen. She hollers, she sobs, she moans, she swoops, she rasps, she croons, she shudders. Not since I last saw Al Green have I seen such a bravura display of vocal prowess. On a rainy night in London, the 71-year-old singer of gospel, soul and R&B was in town for a one-off gig (and also for a Jools Holland appearance) to promote her new album, You Are Not Alone.
With a three-piece band – guitar, bass, drums – and three backing singers, among them her sister Yvonne Staples, she banished the cold and the wet with a set that radiated warmth, goodness and sheer uncomplicated godliness. Perhaps I’m being presumptuous, but I can’t imagine that many of those in the Jazz Café crowd were churchgoers, but I for one was bowled over by the power of her faith.
And even more so by the power of her voice, and the way she floated and swooped across the steady interjections of her backing singers. Even the way she held the microphone should be a lesson to any young X Factor wannabes who might fancy themselves as “soul” singers, as, rather than gluing it to her lips and belting out the song, she constantly moved it away from or towards her mouth to attenuate or accentuate a note, or to finesse a phrase. To call it “technique” would be to make it sound cold and contrived, when in fact it was entirely natural, easy, born of decades of experience.
And it occurred to me while I was watching and listening that when she talked and sang about civil rights and strife and struggle, she’s actually been there; as a member of The Staple Singers, led by her father, Pops Staples (pictured right, with Mavis far right), she helped to create the soundtrack to the Civil Rights movement. And when she sang "The Weight", it was freighted with the weight of real, lived experience, The Staple Singers having sung it with The Band in The Last Waltz.
The new album was produced by fellow Chicagoan Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, the latest in a line of musicians to have collaborated with her (following on from Ry Cooder and Prince), and it was material from this that formed the bulk of the show: rousing gospel standards such as "Creep Along Moses"; "Losing You", a well-chosen lump-in-the-throat ballad by Randy Newman; the title song, written by Tweedy, sparse and restrained; and the uplifting "I Belong to the Band" by the Reverend Gary Davis.
Though her voice was in fantastic shape, she seemed a little breathless at times; an instrumental interlude by her backing band gave her the chance to sit and recuperate, as Rick Holstrom and Jeff Turmes, taking it in turns on lead guitar, picked out delicate melodic pathways, Turmes in particular turning in an elegant slide-guitar cameo, the piercing tone of his instrument bringing to mind Roy Buchanan.
Then, refreshed and revitalised, Staples returned to the spotlight for the finale, an extended “I’ll Take You There”, a hit for The Staple Singers in 1972. Heaven knows how many thousands of times Mavis Staples has sung this soulful classic, and as she brought the audience on board for the call-and-response chorus, she was clearly going through a familiar and well-practised routine; yet she still made it sound fresh and urgent.
At the end she was crackling with life. With The Staple Singers, and on her own behalf, she’s been singing, she reminded us, for 60 years. “And I ain’t tired yet.”
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Mavis Staples sings "You Are Not Alone" with Jeff Tweedie:
