Laura Mvula @ the Waterfront

Latitude Festival. That’s where I’d last seen Laura Mvula play. An epic and ethereal performance, her voice sailing through the BBC 6Music tent and out over the Henham plains, it was a masterful, yet detached performance. So when Mvula gleefully introduces us to Nina, her white 80s throwback keytar - playfully assuring us it wasn’t an ironing board, it makes me wonder if tonight’s offering is going to be a much more intimate affair.

It’s been some time since I was at the Waterfront; a musical home-from-home since the age of 14, my short sabbatical from its events ended with a reminder of how much I love its low ceilings and wide expanse. As music plays, you feel like you and the sound are being fused together like a hot pressed sandwich. The old place lends itself to this newfound closeness I feel with Mvula’s act.

Aesthetically, she is less removed from us; sporting a casual rolled-up jersey top and accent of jewellery, she jokes that she shouldn’t have put make up on, as she was likely to sweat it off. Sure, she has star quality, but not too much that it pushes her away from her 8-strong band that join her this evening. It feels like a collaboration, and when we get introduced to two of them as her brother (James Douglas on cello) and sister (Dionne Douglas on bass guitar), the sense of something symphonic grows stronger, as if she’s just one instrument, playing her part. It may be something she learned answering the phones for the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, before her own career stage call emerged.

The set is brilliantly curated; she takes us through light and shade, and makes an early admission that tonight’s set will feature nearly all of her new material, from upcoming second album, The Dreaming Room. Having already been exposed to three of its singles; the bass-rich, funky Overcome, featuring the resurgent Nile Rodgers; the protest song, People, that uses the three backing vocalists to devastating effect (and incidentally invites Wretch 32 to spur a verse on its official release); and finally the rousing Phenomenal Woman (perhaps a tribute to Maya Angelou – who died between the making of album one and two), the admission that tonight would be new-music heavy doesn’t leave me with the normal empty, impatient feel that those words usually invoke. That, and the fact that album number two was produced by Troy Miller, composer and producer extraordinaire, who – when he’s not sitting behind Laura playing the drums, as he does tonight – counts among his customers names like Amy Winehouse and Mark Ronson. He’s a regular right-hand man of Mvula’s now though, and judging on tonight’s offering, it’s a fruitful partnership.

Laura Mvula is a crowd-pleaser; despite the promise of weighting on new material, she knows exactly when to pepper in tracks from her much-loved first album Sing to the Moon, which have us right in the palm of her hands, and she keeps the candid repartee flowing, offering a level of honesty that I would defy anyone not to fall for. She talks about not one, but two recent heartbreaks that informed the new album; first the split from her husband, who gave her the Mvula name that she’s elevated beyond his own stature, and a second brief tryst that ended unexpectedly, and has fuelled some of her new material. She admits that the intended love song, Kiss My Feet, had to be rewritten at the demise of the relationship, and we see a flash of the Phenomenal Woman as she says she’s renamed the track, Kiss My Arse.

She certainly carries the dichotomy of most women; fiercely brave in one breath, and delicately sensitive in the other, and it’s shown none more than when her band leaves her alone on stage for a rendition of the painfully personal Father, Father, from album number one. Her fragility is palpaple, despite the strength of that unwavering vocal.

It is a brilliantly accomplished and perfectly pitched Sunday night set, that is concluded with a masterful encore. First, a stripped back rendition of Michael Jackson’s Human Nature, accompanied only by her brother James on cello, it was a soft, sincere sing-along before the culmination of the evening with crowd favourite, and former single, Green Garden.

Laura Mvula is often cited as a modern jazz artist, but the sometimes inaccessibility of that genre doesn’t do her justice. Tonight, she embodied her neo-soul heritage, wearing her heart on her sleeve, delivering music that had an intravenous connection to ours.