Camden New Journal - Music: Martha Reeves

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The Review - MUSIC - GROOVES with CHARLOTTE CHAMBERS
Published: 20 September 2007

Martha’s masterclass

REVIEW: MARTHA REEVES
Jazz Cafe

IT’S nights like this when you wish you had a time machine that could warp back to the 1960s and the days of proper soul music.
Watching Martha Reeves belt out Nowhere To Run and Dancing In The Streets is a lesson in how it should be done: simple horns, simple choruses and a knockout voice. If only today’s so-called soul singers could follow the template.
Here Reeves was, on stage at the Jazz Café alongside her original Vandella sisters Lois and Delphine, apparently still full of enthusiasm for 40 year-old songs that remain so catchy it took only a misery-grump not to clap along and shift their feet.
If the 10-minute version of (Love Is Like A) Heatwave, delivered with a 10-piece band, did not move you, you might as well give up gig-going and record collecting and take up embroidery or brass-rubbing instead.
There were some duller moments. Some schmaltzy ballads have not dated as well and covering Ella Fitzgerald didn’t quite work – Reeves’ delivery is suited to a more frenetic Motown blast.
But you could forgive a 66-year-old for having a break during an otherwise all-out soul assault. By the time she wound up for her final song, Dancing In The Streets, predictably, the crowd was happy to sing the chorus for her.
And it still sounded better than Bowie and Jagger’s awful cover.
Unfortunately, the average age inside the Jazz Café was probably over 40. There was a musical lesson to be had here but most of the people bobbing their heads had enjoyed learning it many times before.
RICHARD OSLEY

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