Madeleine Peyroux At Barbican Hall

Madeleine Peyroux
Barbican Hall
Let's Walk
London
July 21, 2024

In the early 1990s, still a teenager, US-born Madeleine Peyroux was a member of the Paris-based buskers The Lost Wandering Blues And Jazz Band led by the singer and raconteur Danny Fitzgerald. Peyroux cut her professional teeth travelling around Europe with the band, singing and playing guitar on an eclectic range of material containing a large proportion of vintage jazz and blues. The variety of songs on Peyroux's first album, Dreamland (Atlantic, 1996), reflected those formative street-performer years, ranging from the Patsy Cline hit "Walking After Midnight" through Edith Piaf's "La Vie En Rose" and on to Bessie Smith's "Restless Blues." Reviews were mostly positive, and the album sold well enough, but Peyroux backed out of sight for around eight years. Returning, she found major-league success with her similarly programmed second album, Careless Love (Rounder, 2004), a melodically and rhythmically irresistible mix of vintage jazz and blues, chanson and songs by Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and Hank Williams.

There were three Peyroux originals on Dreamland and one on Careless Love. By contrast, the material on summer 2024's Let's Walk (Just One Recording), Peyroux's ninth album and the centrepiece of her Barbican performance, is composed entirely of originals written with multi-instrumentalist and Steely Dan/Donald Fagen associate Jon Herington, the album's co-producer. The stylistic mix is pretty much as before, with a touch more blues-rock.

Peyroux's transition from covers' artist to singer-songwriter has been steady, albeit not in a straight line. With it has come a shift in lyric subject-matter. From mostly inhabiting a typical street performers' bag of familiar good times/bad times songs, celebrations of love found and laments for love lost, she has embraced political and societal subject matter. Let's Walk is the most politically focused and explicit album she has yet released. It has songs dealing with civil rights, white privilege, enslaved people, refugees, violence against women and the scourge of malaria in poorer countries. There is just one unalloyed knees-up, "Showman Dan," a salute to Peyroux's mentor, Danny Fitzgerald, who passed in 2017 (see the YouTube below).

How great it is to listen to a jazz-based US singer who is not afraid publicly to stand up against her country's approaching tide of neo-fascism and its plans to subvert the Constitution, ban abortions, generally wind the cultural clock back and even—according to the nutjob standing for Republican Vice President, who is so pig ignorant that he thinks Britain is an "Islamist" state—to ban divorce.

Keeping both feel good and politically attuned material simultaneously in your repertoire is not an easy thing for an artist to execute. But Peyroux did so with aplomb at the Barbican. At a guess, many in the audience were there mainly for Careless Love and may or may not have been aware of the more recent shift in the lyric emphasis of Peyroux's music. She did not preach to the audience. She let the songs do the talking. Only once did she make an overtly political statement, when introducing the title track from Let's Walk, written around two years ago and inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement. (The song is strongly reminiscent of US choreographer Jane Dudley's 1938 masterpiece Harmonica Breakdown, which was also inspired by Black Americans' struggle for civil rights, is danced to music by Sonny Terry, and which shares with "Let's Walk" a vibe of what back-a-yard Rastas used to call "trodding," meaning purposeful walking.)

Peyroux began the concert with two songs from Careless Love, her original "Don't Wait Too Long" and Bob Dylan's "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go," before performing most of Let's Walk, broken up by two more Careless Love songs, Leonard Cohen's "Dance Me To The End Of Love" and James P. Johnson, Saul Bernie and Stella Ungar's "Don't Cry Baby." "Let's Walk" was the closer. She encored with Vincent Scotto, Martha Koenig and Spencer Williams' "J'ai Deux Amours," from Careless Love.

Peyroux's accompanying quartet, which included Let's Walk's Jon Herington on guitar and Graham Hawthorne on drums, was pitch perfect. It was a heartening evening all round.

The performance was produced by Serious for Barbican's Summer Jazz series.

PERSONNEL: Madeleine Peyroux, vocals and guitar; Jon Herington: guitar and vocals; Andrew Ezrin: piano, keys and vocals; Paul Frazier, bass and vocals; Graham Hawthorne: drums and vocals.