A Change Is Gonna Come: Music For Human Rights review - a powerful evening of protest songs

Jane Cornwell22 May 2018

‘A change is gonna come,’ sang Sam Cooke in 1964. It did but it didn’t. Covering the enduring civil rights anthem, Carleen Anderson was realistic, and impatient: ‘When is a change gonna come?’ beseeched the Houston-raised singer, seated at her keyboards, conjuring choirs through a digital harmoniser.

This was a powerful evening of protest songs intended to provoke, galvanise, make us feel less alone; delivered by an all-star quartet of Anderson, pianist Nikki Yeoh, rapper Speech Debelle and saxophonist Nubya Garcia, with backing from bassist Renell Shaw and drummer Rod Young, it packed a sucker punch. 
 
Garcia opened the show with Alabama, capturing the sorrowful intensity of John Coltrane’s original prayer with grace and technical rigour, her arabesques swirling in a noirish half light.

Iconic tunes were reimagined: Anderson turned the Woody Guthrie ballad I Ain’t Got No Home into a paean to global homelessness, showing off her knack for shifting from deep growls to high notes that she’d bend and extend; the Mercury-winning Debelle gave us Scott-Heron’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, spitting its phrases with a winning combination of righteous anger and quiet dignity. And stage left, corralled behind keyboards, laptop and grand piano, the gifted Nikki Yeoh played in ways meditative, witty and, on Marvin Gaye’s darkly atmospheric Inner City Blues, all-stops-out furious. 
 
‘The future belongs to those who prepare for it,’ intoned Renell Shaw during Anderson’s own spacey, experimental Amelioration. Last night both the future and the present belonged the four amazing women onstage, their authenticity reinforcing the message in the music, and bringing something else. Something essential: hope.

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