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Corinne Bailey Rae Electrifies Blue Note Residency With ‘Black Rainbows’
Corinne Bailey Rae at Blue Note Jazz Club: 'Black Rainbows' stuns in a live setting.
A vintage photo of a teenage girl who won the “Miss New York Transit” title 70-some years ago inspired the riot grrrl energy of her song “New York Transit Queen” (Rae even tracked down and interviewed the woman, Audrey Smaltz); the story of writer/abolitionist Harriet Jacobs, who escaped slavery but spent seven years in a cramped hiding space, watching her children play through a peephole, informed the hopeful yet elegiac “Peach Velvet Sky”; advertisements from Valmor Products, a Chicago beauty brand geared toward African American women, led to the jazzy, ambient “He Will Follow You With His Eyes”; and a sweaty dance party to Knuckles’ records at the Stony Island Arts Bank resulted in the thumping “Put It Down.” In the midst of performing “Put It Down” at the Blue Note on Friday (Feb. 16), a woman in the seated audience stood up and began dancing – greeting the sight with a smile, Rae stepped down from the stage to join her as the band kept the house-inflected groove going. But Black Rainbows stands as Rae’s finest artistic statement to date, an exquisite tapestry that electrifies both intellectually and emotionally – and seeing her present this layered work live is a gift.
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