I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: NILÜFER YANYA-Tiny Desk Concert #892 (September 18, 2019).

I saw Nilüfer Yanya open for Sharon Van Etten.  I was pretty excited to see her because of all the buzz that I was hearing about her.  Her set was good, although I feel like she seemed a bit nervous (maybe not, who knows).

This past summer, I was happy to see she was playing at Newport Folk Festival, but we arrived too late to see her (bummer).

This Tiny Desk Concert doesn’t really make her music quieter–it’s pretty quiet to begin with.  Maybe not quiet, exactly, but restrained.

There’s a hush to the music of Nilüfer Yanya that made the Tiny Desk the perfect stage for her sound. On a hot summer day, the British singer and her band — made up of Jazzi Bobbi primarily on sax, Lucy Lu on bass, Ellis Dupuy on drums and Nilüfer on guitar and vocals — performed their three-song set with restraint and subtlety. At moments, the music felt like an eruption waiting to happen, though the suave, refined sound left an indelible vibe in the room.

Yanya plays three songs (all from her album Miss Universe.)  Only one of those song had I heard live.  And surprisingly to me, she didn’t play what I think of as her biggest hit (and the one I like most), “In My Head.”

The set starts with “Baby Luv,” her first single.  I like the staccato feel of everything in this song–from the guitars to her vocal style.  I also really like the gentle synth notes from Jazzi Bobbi.  Bob Boilen seems to really like the lyrics, although I don’t really get it:

“Do you like pain?
Again, again, again, again
Again, oh, again
Do you like pain?”

I thin what’s most interesting (and polariziang I guess) is her vocal delivery: “thickly accented, laid-back vocals”

I don’t know anyone who sings like Nilüfer, but I’m reminded of Astrud Gilberto singing bossa nova. There’s a sophisticated sensibility rough enough around the edges that I find captivating.

 

I really like the chord progression of “The Unordained.”  There’s a lot more jaggedness in the middle section with some cymbal crashes and loud chords.  Jazzi Bobbi plays a quiet sax solo over the end.

For “Angels” Lucy Lu moves to synth while Jazzi Bobbi intros with a jazzi solo.  This song builds the most and is the least spare of her songs.  The end of the song includes some nice backing vocals and more of Jazzi’s quiet sax.

[READ: October 6, 2019] “Shape-Ups at Delilah’s”

This is a story about a barber.  A lady barber!

It starts with the barber, Tiny, giving her boyfriend Jerome a haircut.  Jerome’s brother was beaten up and hospitalized and Jerome bawled his eyes out.  Tiny made him sit on a stool and while he cried, she sheared his knotty beads for two hours.  His hair looked great.  And they were both spent.

He looked in the mirror and his eyes said Where in the hell did a woman, a W-O-M-A-N, learn to cut like that?

One year later they were broken up but when Jerome’s mother died, he came by looking for a haircut.  Tiny said no, but eventually gave in (she liked his mother).  When the cut was done, Jerome said, “I’m crying ’cause of my mom but also ’cause this haircut is so goddamn beautiful.”

We learn how Tiny first started cutting hair (on a whim when she found her father’s clippers).   She worked mostly on herself–changing style every two weeks.  Then she began choosing lovers based on the shape of their heads–until she lost interest in cutting their hair.

It was a year after Jerome’s mother died that Tiny opened up Tiny’s Hair Technology.  The city was in the midst of The Great Hair Crisis.  Every single barbering man had somehow lost his touch.  It had been ten years of wild raggedy afros.   Men with beautiful haircuts became as mythical as glowing wolves.

And yet, a shop of lady barbers?  Who had ever heard of such a thing?

Jerome came into the shop and asked for a cut, but she refused and told him to sit with Mariah.  Jerome said if she gave him a good cut he would recommend her.   She refused again and he promised that she would get hers.

After a few weeks of an empty building, she arrived one morning to find a huge line outside her shop. One man had been waiting since six in the morning.  There was even a boy.  When she said to the father that it was a school day, the father said, “I take him out of school when he’s got a doctor’s appointment, too.”

She finished the first man and there was applause.  It soon grew rowdy and Tiny joked that she didn’t want to call the police on them.  The Great Hair Crisis was over!

But in the middle of the day, a man with a Bible came in shouting “And De-li-lah said to Samson, Tell em, I pray thee, where in thy great strength lieth and wherewith though mightest be bound to afflict thee.”   He accused the men of giving away their strength for a nice hiarcut.

The preacher was Kimothy, a barber who once owned the Mobile Cutting Unit.  He had found God in prison and said she must be Delilah.

One of the preacher’s flock was in the chair and the reverend told him to leave this minute.  His hair was half done and he started to get up  But Tiny said “You ain’t telling no one Tiny did that to your head.”

She was given accolades and praise as well as bricks wrapped in bible verses tossed through her window.

Soon after that Tiny decided to change the name of her shop to Delilah’s.  And every day there were more and more men–even those who had once yelled at her with Rev. Kimothy.

One night Jerome returned.

Jerome reveals that he is responsible for all the attention she has gotten.  At first she is mad that he sent the Reverend on her heels.  But he says he just wanted to share her skills–he didn’t think Kimothy would act like that.

She cut his hair and when she was done he asked how she works such magic.

She asked him, “Men barbers got some kind of secret?  They grip the clippers with they dicks or something?”

He was serious, though.  He wanted to know what her secret was.  He wouldn’t believe her that she had no secret.   Finally, exhausted, she told him the secret was lye.  Red Devil Lye–makes the hair manageable.

Shortly after a man came running into Delilah’s with tears in his eyes.  Turns out that the other barber in town, Sonny who was once the king but has lost his touch, has used Red Devil Lye on this poor man.

Jerome came back a few days later humiliated and angry that she had lied to him, even though he clearly had been trying to give away her secret.  This time she told him that the secret was piss–she soaks everything in jars of piss overnight.

Jerome smiled and said that that made so much sense.

I have never understood the cult of barbers in the black community (because I’m not black, obviously).  And I honestly can’t believe that such a big deal was made out of lady barbers, but this story was really funny and really touching.  I liked everything about it.