Caro Emerald brought the house down in Budapest
I got home from the concert only a few minutes ago and I am still completely under its spell. I had a fantastic time. I discovered Caro Emeralda few years ago when YouTube was playing random songs and suddenly I thought: “What on earth is this unbelievably good music, and who is singing it?” She is Caroline Esmeralda van der Leeuw, better known as Caro Emerald:
After that I began devouring her songs one after another, and I felt that her music contained almost everything I look for in music: originality, and beauty created from simplicity. I became curious about the woman behind such good music. It turned out that she is Dutch and graduated as a jazz singer in 2005, deliberately preparing for this kind of career. Her earliest songs were recorded in an improvised studio set up in her own living room. In 2009 Back It Up became a major success, and in 2010 A Night Like This established her for good.
Fortunately she is not a one-song – or even a two-song – singer. Since then she has performed plenty of songs of a similar calibre, much to the delight of her fans. Caro Emerald's music combines the sound of earlier decades with modern expectations extremely well. Many things are mixed together in what her band plays – jazz-flavoured electro-pop, broadly speaking – but it is difficult to define precisely because the management and musicians are imaginative enough to arrange and reinterpret their own songs differently depending on where they are playing, what type of event it is and who the audience will be. You can listen to countless live recordings and still struggle to find two versions of the same song that are completely identical. A Night Like This sounded different at Sziget Festival, at the Montreux Jazz Festival and yesterday at the Papp László Sports Arena. Sometimes she is accompanied by an acoustic trio. This means they can always show something new and the songs never become boring.
There were already huge numbers of people there at around 7:30, and by eight o'clock the Arena was full – genuinely sold out. The stage was positioned along one of the longer sides of the Arena, with the seating behind it and to both sides curtained off, while both the seats opposite the stage and the standing area filled up. There was no support band, but I really liked the recorded music played before the concert. It put everyone perfectly in the mood for what was about to begin. The current tour is built around a sunshine-weekend-happiness theme, which makes sense because last year's album was titled Emerald Island. Accordingly, the stage design was relatively simple but very atmospheric, evoking a Caribbean island club, and the projected images and animations behind the stage matched that idea too.
A few minutes after eight the auditorium went dark, the band took their positions in seconds and, without any kind of warm-up, immediately started playing at 110%. I was curious whether they would do anything new compared with the concert recordings I had seen before. And YES – something quite significant: the very first song featured both a mandolin and a ukulele!
The ukulele is in the hands of the third musician from the right, who also happens to be an excellent saxophonist, guitarist and keyboard player.
I often say that a singer is only as good as they can be live. If somebody's voice sounds as though it were coming from a CD, there cannot be much wrong with it. You can say that about Caro Emerald without hesitation: she sang the entire concert with a powerful, crystal-clear voice. Hats off to her. Her songs generally consist of only a few chords, but they are put together inventively; the arrangements are varied – yesterday they played with a medium-sized band – and the vocal melody in every song is exceptionally well composed. It is also worth adding that many of these melodies are difficult to sing. Her vocal lines often contain chromatic sequences of many notes moving by small intervals. Caro Emerald has probably sung them thousands of times, yet singing them flawlessly still requires focus and concentration. Another appealing aspect of her songs is that musical devices which might occasionally – and only rarely – sound a little cheap or almost kitschy in somebody else's hands, for example a few turns in Liquid Lunch or Maestro, are presented in such a way that you do not feel any resistance at all. Instead, you get that overwhelming, irresistible, get-up-and-dance sensation through your whole body. And they can perform the same material not only as jazz-techno-pop but also as subtle jazz, to the point where a casual listener might identify the song only from the lyrics even though the chords themselves are unchanged.
I should mention that the sound engineers were not at their best at the beginning of the concert. The high frequencies were pushed so far that the clarinet – or perhaps soprano saxophone; I could not see clearly – seemed to carve a trench straight through your eardrum, although they later corrected the problem. If I am going to be fussy, I should also mention that the bass reinforcement was not always perfect. In one or two songs the very lowest notes simply did not come through properly: either the system was being overdriven, something was resonating, or perhaps that is simply the acoustics of the Arena. It was most obvious during Maestro, because that song – which contains some incredibly inventive chord progressions – is pulled and dragged forward by its bass line, and this time much of it was reduced to a booming growl. The song has an extraordinarily distinctive atmosphere; I absolutely love it. A few tracks might also have benefited from an acoustic drum kit. Yes, there was percussion, but the kick drum came from the DJ. It was perfectly fine – that is not the point – but a “real” drum kit still adds some punch to the whole thing. And one final piece of nit-picking: on the one hand I was delighted that they had brought a double bass, and of course there was a bass guitar too, but I did not really understand why in one or two songs both were replaced by an electronic bass keyboard – or whatever that little device was. All right, this was not a jazz festival, so the synth bass was perfectly acceptable .
Now to the musicians: you can speak about them only in superlatives. Caro Emerald's band is full of extraordinarily talented and accomplished players. We have known for a long time that the skinny guitarist is sensational, but only now did I fully realise that all the other musicians are equally top-class. Most of them also play several instruments rather than just one. The saxophonist, for example, also played ukulele, guitar and piano, depending on what the arrangement required. And those two horn players! Honestly, they absolutely tore up the stage – they played unbelievably well. Around the middle of the concert there was an instrumental party piece led by the two horn players, and with only slight exaggeration I would call it one of the best performances of the evening. Musically it was completely on top of its game. So hats off to the guys: they are on the same professional level as Caro Emerald herself, and the cohesion and communication within the band worked continuously from beginning to end.
The order of the songs was actually fairly predictable – at least for me, having watched many Caro Emerald concert recordings. From the beginning to around the halfway point there were lots of upbeat party songs, then one or two “let's get this one out of the way” numbers – genuinely no more than that – followed by a return to the main direction, which of course ended in gigantic mayhem after the encore. This is a well-established recipe, and many international stars structure their set lists in a similar way.
Caro Emerald also came across as very likeable in person. She did not talk too much – which is not why we bought the tickets anyway – and many songs followed one another without any spoken introduction. At the end of each song she thanked the applause with a modest little “thank you”. She commanded the stage and enchanted us, the audience. We also received the standard “what a wonderful audience you are” speech. She said that the previous evening she had been in Slovenia, where the crowd was fairly small but extremely loud. Then she told us: “Budapest, there are so many of you, oh my God, stand up and dance in the seats too, and you are the best audience.” The funny thing is that she said this at exactly the same point – during A Night Like This – where at her Glastonbury concert she had declared that the Glastonbury crowd was the best audience in the world. I envy international stars for the way the audience in front of them at any given moment is always the best audience of their lives. It warms the hearts of the people in the room even when they know it cannot really be true, and by the following day it has expired anyway, because the crowd in the next city will become the best audience. I will stop being mean now, because Caro Emerald does not deserve it – even if, a quarter of a beat after all that enthusiastic audience-praising, she entered the next vocal line late and immediately corrected the mistake. Did I really just write that down as well? I deserve twenty lashes. But that is what happened. Naturally, that is not what will make the evening memorable. What will remain is the wonderful atmosphere Caro Emerald and her band created in the Arena and the enormous amount of energy they transmitted through their music. I do not know how everybody else felt, but I think we had the chance to see and hear a fantastic concert by an exceptionally talented and outstanding performer, and if I get the opportunity I will very happily go to another Caro Emerald concert.
And finally, a short video I recorded toward the end of the concert. Of course it does not come close to capturing the atmosphere, but for those who were there it may make it easier to remember just how good last night was!
