Two utterly different albums are each a demonstration of Whirimako Black’s daring.
Is there a singer in this country more fearless than Whirimako Black? The dozen years since her first release – Hinepukohurangi: Children of the Mist, a collection of traditional waiata – have heard her singular voice in the company of Zimbabwean protest singers and uilleann pipers, funk bands and electronic collagists, swing trios and symphony orchestras.
And these wide-ranging collaborations never seem mere novelties. Whatever the song or the setting, Black seems to dig deep inside the music to bring out something personal and truthful. This is partly because of her passionate commitment to te reo Maori, her first language. Whether she’s intoning the poetry of her ancestors or translated Pakeha pop songs, the connection to her culture is always implicit. In the last months of 2011, she released two utterly different discs, each in its own way a demonstration of her daring.
The Late Night Plays is the latest of what could be called her “jazz albums”; an occasional series that began with 2006’s Soul Sessions, and finds her interpreting blues, pop and swing standards, accompanied by a club-sized combo. Where the new album differs from her previous standards collections is that for the first time she delivers the entire set in English.
There is little that is uncommon about the song selection: frequently covered classics like Lover Man and At Last, and more recent inductees to the lounge bar canon such as Leonard Cohen’s Dance Me to the End of Love and U2’s Love is Blindness. But where singing in te reo gave her earlier standards collections an immediate point of difference, this time she is thrown entirely on her resources as a vocalist to create something of her own.
And she does. Her tone is as earthy as ever, and she employs her customary restraint, letting you sense that the power in her voice is rarely unleashed to full force. But even more impressive is the rhythmic relationship she forms with the excellent piano-led trio. When Did You Leave Heaven? has never been funkier than the version that opens this album, Black sliding her phrases around Jonathan Zwartz’s syncopated bass line.
The other release, Te More, finds her returning to her native tongue in collaboration with the master of taonga puoro (Maori instruments), Richard Nunns. It takes the form of two suites, which weave together new waiata by Black and Nunns with moteatea (traditional chants) dating back at least as far as the early 19th century.
Recorded by Steve Garden, whose masterful mixing really makes him an equal collaborator in this project, the whole thing unfolds dreamily and hypnotically. Nunns’s instruments – treated with electronic effects, without compromising the essential beauty of their acoustic tones and textures – dance around Black’s voice. Sometimes they are like birds or insects in a forest, other times they might be spirits answering her across the ages.
THE LATE NIGHT PLAYS, Whirimako Black (Ode); TE MORE, Whirimako Black and Richard Nunns (Rattle).