Fringe Music

Michelle Shocked

New Town Theatre

FOUR STARS

Barbara Morrison: I Wanna Be Loved

The Outhouse

FOUR STARS

Etherwave: Adventures with the Theremin

Sweet Grassmarket

THREE STARS

EVEN by the standards of the Fringe, where intimate performance spaces are quite commonplace, the first nights of Michelle Shocked’s New Town Theatre residency have a collectors’ item quality, with the audience joining her onstage and the Texan troubadour singing and playing guitar acoustically. If you liked her best known song, Anchorage, and fancy hearing it as if Shocked is sharing it with you in your kitchen, then get along before the word gets out and the PA gets turned on.

Anchorage, with its informal updates on the various characters therein, was the bonus track on Saturday. Over twenty-four nights Shocked is rotating her Mercury trilogy of albums and this was Arkansas Traveler’s turn, many of its songs drawing directly on Shocked’s musical roots and influences. Hold Me Back picks up the story of Frankie and Johnny and Prodigal Daughter revises Cotton Eyed Joe, and the background to Shocked taking poetic licence becomes an integral, winning element of their performance.

She turned the audience into her personal choir with her girls and boys singalong parts, made sure the youngsters accompanying their parents didn’t feel left out of the adult’s fun and latterly magicked up a fiddler, who played from the auditorium on the songs based on traditional reels. Even in an age when stars interact with fans through social media, this felt like a down-home, down to earth, direct, open, and friendly meeting with an honest and occasionally indiscreet (Billy Bragg, how could you?) personality.

Runs ends August 28.

YPSILANTI, Michigan’s greatest gift to the blues and jazz world, Barbara Morrison is so convincing in portraying the queen of the blues, Dinah Washington that sometimes you have to remind yourself that it’s not her own seventh husband she’s talking about or her own gun she pulled on an untrustworthy agent.

Morrison sings as herself, using lived-in and elastically expressed songs from Washington’s eventful and majorly successful career to thread “The Queen’s” story together from church choir to stardom through hardship, mischief, husbands (they all “Had. To. Go”), road tales, and helpful professional advice from jazz and blues masters including Lionel Hampton and Joe Williams.

With a deferential band comprising local players Jimmy Taylor (bass), Bobby Stewart (drums), Phil Adams (guitar), and Tom Finlay (keyboard), Morrison delivered Come Rain or Come Shine with mostly the latter, had everyone on their feet for Every Day I Have the Blues and localised Ain’t Nobody’s Business with some, hopefully unfulfilled, promises of misbehaviour. A fun and very real session with a singer who quickly and emphatically got the show’s titular wish.

Run ends August 10.

SIMON Cowell described Ms Hypnotique’s Theremin playing as the worst thing he’d ever heard. Quite a statement from the great talent spotter, but as the musical interludes in Etherwave show, the first electronic instrument and perfect pitch aren’t an easy match. What Etherwave does have going for it is Ms Hypnotique’s research, some of which might have you Googling to find out how often your leg has been pulled, and a high entertainment factor as she charts the instrument’s history, celebrates its greatest exponents and their possible KGB connections, hooks up with fellow players around the world, and tests the audience’s listening skills – with prizes.

Run ends August 14.

Rob Adams