Hindi Zahra w/ Sokoun @ Le National

Setting: Super hot night outside, mega ice-box, jet cooled inside. What were they thinking? A nice fog formed at the entrance though...

Anyways, shaking from the air conditioning, the ‘opening show’ of the Nuits d’Afrique festival (though there were two preceding nights of shows) started with (as usual) a lot of blabitty blah by the bigwigs. Fast-forward to the blissed out, trance/trad sounds of Tunisian/Lebanese/Quebecois Sokoun. Despite looking like stiff deer in the headlights, the three instrumentalists (violin, oud and percussion) were mesmerizing. Their all-original set of North African music was outstanding, particularly the work of the percussionist. The one inevitable slow jam was an (expected) bummer, as were the aggravating attempts at an applaud-along by the audience (why ya gotta clap your hands, huh?) but generally I was trippin’ balls on their arabesques.

Then came headliner Hindi Zahra. Her band came out first in true soul-diva fashion, but wait! This is Nuits d’Afrique, right? What’s with the plaid wearing Broken Social Scene bro-down? No matter. Hindi started to croon off-stage and then shit went off. Clad in a bright green and black parrot and weed-(?) patterned dress and enough bangles to strangle even the Bangles, she instantly captured the audience. The music is surprisingly ‘non-African’ (whatever that means), sticking largely to a neo-soul, rock/pop format. At times the band shone, especially when they moved to more Afro-tinged material (a couple of Tinariwen-esque Saharan guitar rock numbers and a West African inspired new dance band track a la Amadou and Mariam were definite highlights) though they too often brought out the blues hammer and obscenely blew their axe-load all over the stage. It was all good though because Ms. Zahra was the main event (CJLO reference!) Singing mostly in English with a few Arabic tunes, she had the audience eating out of her hand. Sing-alongs, hand waves, hand claps (they finally got their turn), jokes and sways, she had everyone under her thumb. With a voice along the lines of Amy Winehouse – the power, the slight whine, but minus the crack-headness- and moves along the lines of an epileptic orgasming, but it all worked like gangbusters. Mid-set acoustic pop ballad, Bob Marley sing-along, psych-trip North African jam, blues rock soul diva showcase, even hair metal bash outro, she could do no wrong, even while she was doing wrong by my usual standards, see above list. She rocked it! Heavy cheese, but she spread that shit like butter. Very nice and good.