Summerhall, Edinburgh
4 stars
When a large wooden
painting of Cab Calloway's face hung from the ceiling of Summerhall's
dissection room came crashing down, narrowly missing the star of this
unique art and music collaboration, it could have proved disastrous.
Nile Rodgers, however, brushed away the incident with the same charm
that has seen him through a forty-year musical adventure which began
with Chic, and is currently riding high with Get Lucky, the song
Rodgers wrote with Daft Punk that is currently the biggest selling
record of the summer.
An Indigo Night in F is
a new suite charting Harlem's rich sonic history that came out of
7x7, Belgian artist Jean Pierre Muller's installation presented at
Summerhall in 2012, and which featured work by the likes of Robert
Wyatt and Archie Shepp as well as Rodgers. Muller explained all this
to a crowd of just 300 from a customised stage area which over the
next two hours was gradually decked out with cut-out dioramas of
Harlem stalwarts across the years, including the aforementioned Mr
Calloway.
While Muller did live
paintings on a platform above, Rodgers regaled us with yarns from his
own back pages framed around the seven F's that have informed it,
from family and friendship through to frustration, fate and fame.
Each of these was punctuated with stripped-down bursts of Rodgers'
finest riffs played on solo guitar as well as wicked impressions of a
cast list that included Grace Jones and even Irvine Welsh. Though
effectively a work-in-progress trailer for a much bigger multi-media
project, Rodgers and Muller proved to be joyous company in one of the
most life-affirming events of the year.
The Herald, June 24th 2013
ends
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