“What the world needs now,” wrote Hal David and Burt Bacharach, “is love, sweet love”. And who better to dispense such a spoonful of sugar to make the bitter pill that is Covid go down than Nurse Gladys – sorry, Liane Carroll – whose live-streamed gig from the 606 Club as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival was the perfect tonic to lift the spirits and banish the lockdown blues.

Sure, nothing beats the intimacy of a jazz club and the chemistry between artist and audience (and the basement of the 606 Club lends itself beautifully to both), but as Donald Trump callously said of the pandemic, “it is what it is”. And what Liane Carroll is is a master of connecting to the truth of a lyric and conveying its meaning to the heart of an audience – albeit a virtual one, which gave rise to the quip, I started my career playing to empty jazz clubs, so it has come full circle.” Badum tish!

Opening with a blistering five-song medley – bookended by the self-penned Dublin Morning from her 2003 solo album Billy No Mates and the first of several Laura Nyro songs, the fittingly toe-tapping California Shoeshine Boys – Liane Carroll’s trio featuring Roger Carey on bass guitar and Russell Field on drums were in fine, playful fettle. Bouncing off one another like kids on a trampoline.

With “no one in the place” apart from owner Steve Rubie and a resident sound engineer, a smoky rendition of One For My Baby was followed by a comical dig about artists being encouraged to retrain. “Oh, dear! What can that matter be?” being the title of a proposed Quantum Physics-inspired nursery rhyme, whose terribly tenuous link to time acted as a springboard for a jaunty take on I Didn’t Know What Time It Was from Prince Andrew’s favourite Rodgers and Hart musical Too Many Girls.

The styles swung from blues to jazz to samba. And the diversity of covers ranged from Donald Fagan’s The Nightfly and Tom Waits’ Take It With Me to Duke Ellington’s Caravan and “father of the blues” W C Handy’s Saint Louis Blues, a recording of which by Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong was recently described by Liane Carroll as one of her ten favourite tracks as “It’s sung from real time experience with such a natural grace” and the perfect “union of heart, soul, struggle and music”.

Praise I would extend to Carroll’s “two and a half” mid-set solos of A Natural Woman, Sinnerman and Here’s To Life. The latter of which contains the timely lyric, “May all your storms be weathered / And all that’s good get better”. Here’s to life, indeed – and the speedy dispensation of “love, sweet love” in the form of a vaccine!

Peter Callaghan
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