Review: The Late Night Plays, Whirimako Black

Whirimako Black is a woman who can sing the blues and proves it on new album The Late Night Plays.

She covers jazz standards made famous by the likes of Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington and Etta James. Black does a really good job of Billie Holiday's Lover Man and particularly Etta James' At Last.

Newer songs are pretty good, too: U2's Love is Blindness and Erykah Badu's On and On.

Black's voice is stunning.

Her control and delivery is incomparable in Aotearoa popular music terms.

The album is frustratingly close to being exceptional.

Case in point, Joni Mitchell's Both Sides Now, which starts with huge promise then meanders. So, too, with Stevie Wonder's If It's Magic. Black pays homage to Miles Davis with Run The Voodoo Down, and it's not a bad interpretation, either.

It's Davis' album, Kind of Blue, that I keep thinking about - one of the most influential of all time. Unfair, perhaps, to compare it to Davis but that's how good I think Black's album almost is.

The Late Night Plays is similarly recorded: live sessions, no overdubs, little rehearsal - relying on the brilliance of the musicians.

It's growing on me.

Kia mau te wehi.

The Late Night Plays

Whirimako Black

Ode Records