Corinne Bailey Rae at Blue Note: ‘Black Rainbows’ Stuns Live

Corinne Bailey Rae lately wrapped an eight-show residency at Manhattan’s beloved Blue Observe Jazz Membership, performing 2023’s Black Rainbows – which explores soul, storage rock, jazz, downtempo digital and even a little bit of home – in its completely. That album was one of many 12 months’s best, however seeing it offered reside — with Rae sharing the painful and galvanizing tales of Black American historical past that galvanized her to make these songs – made it clear that the ideas and concepts behind the album are as wealthy and gorgeous as its musical tapestry.

Black Rainbows started taking form when the English singer-songwriter visited The Stony Island Arts Financial institution in Chicago’s South Aspect. The hybrid area, which Theaster Gates opened in 2015, is a gallery, media library and museum that encompasses every thing from African American periodicals relationship again to the Nineteen Forties to the private vinyl assortment of home godfather Frankie Knuckles to a set of historic artifacts portraying Black individuals in blatantly racist methods. In brief, it’s an advanced area devoted to African American historical past, one that offers individuals the chance to confront the gorgeous and the ugly in equal measure.

Rae’s go to morphed into an ongoing perusal of the gathering, and shortly, new songs started to take form in her thoughts. A classic photograph of a teenage lady who received the “Miss New York Transit” title 70-some years in the past impressed the riot grrrl vitality of her track “New York Transit Queen” (Rae even tracked down and interviewed the lady, Audrey Smaltz); the story of author/abolitionist Harriet Jacobs, who escaped slavery however spent seven years in a cramped hiding area, watching her youngsters play via a peephole, knowledgeable the hopeful but elegiac “Peach Velvet Sky”; commercials from Valmor Merchandise, a Chicago magnificence model geared towards African American ladies, led to the jazzy, ambient “He Will Observe You With His Eyes”; and a sweaty dance occasion to Knuckles’ information on the Stony Island Arts Financial institution resulted within the thumping “Put It Down.”

Within the midst of performing “Put It Down” on the Blue Observe on Friday (Feb. 16), a lady within the seated viewers stood up and started dancing – greeting the sight with a smile, Rae stepped down from the stage to hitch her because the band saved the house-inflected groove going. And from the sax participant to the drummer, that band was a knockout. Maybe having Rae clarify the tales that impressed the songs earlier than taking part in them pushed her gamers to deliver every one to vivid, vibrant life in that intimate area.

When it got here time for the encore, Rae gamely trotted out her 2006 soul-pop gem “Put Your Data On” and the sweetly soulful “Bother Sleeping” from the identical album. It most likely goes with out saying that she’ll be endlessly related to the previous, and there’s nothing flawed with that – it’s a timeless basic, one which’s lately discovered a Gen Z viewers through a viral cowl. However Black Rainbows stands as Rae’s best inventive assertion thus far, an beautiful tapestry that electrifies each intellectually and emotionally – and seeing her current this layered work reside is a present.