A muggy Sunday night on West 129th Street. On the stage – well, floor – of New York’s compact but history-soaked National Jazz Museum, a soft-spoken Yorkshirewoman is talking us through the hard truths that have inspired her fiercely brilliant new album.
Dressed in a Mary Benson purple jumpsuit decorated with butterflies and psychedelic eyes, and mesmerising the audience with her between-song monologues as much as her new music, this angel of Harlem is Corinne Bailey Rae. Around her, a crack band of musicians hover, waiting for her cue to burst into exquisite blasts of psych-jazz, cosmic funk, dreamy R&B and out-and-out punk.
