Saya Gray gives confusing first Dutch concert

These songs are mostly delicate structures of melody and ingenious instrumentations, along which Gray makes her voice slide or slide. But during the concert the emphasis was on older songs, containing so much variation that, for example, ‘Dizzy Ppl Become Blurry’ sounded as if it were played backwards.

It started promising. Like a female warrior with long hair peaks, shelled in a scarf with a bikini top shocked with fur bouncing Gray on the stage. There she grabbed a giant guitar with two necks, the first of a series of guitars and bass guitars, and she immediately played the beautiful ‘Puddle (or me)’ ‘and’ Thus Is Why (I Don’t Spring 4 Love) ‘. Her band of four musicians played dedicated and accurate and sounded fresh at the same time.

Energetic and bizarre

It was the first concert of the current tour, for the first time with the new repertoire. About seven years ago, Gray acted in the Netherlands as a bass player in the band of R&B singer Daniel Caesar, she said. Gray, daughter of a Japanese music school owner and the Canadian trumpet player Charlie Gray (who played with Aretha Franklin and Tony Bennett), plays piano, bass and guitar from her kindergarten, and sang in the church.

Ten years ago Gray left for London. There she made two albums and two extensive EPs on which she treated original themes in songs such as ‘Edible Thong’ and ‘Pap Test’. The electronics sounds like bouncing ping -pong balls while other instruments swell and slid as easily. Only the popping bass line is constant.

During the concert, Saya Gray was energetic and bizarre. Her comments between the songs was sometimes incomprehensible and about her bikini top she said it was made from the skin of a deceased loved one, but there was always the overwhelming musicality and ambition. Gray hardly seemed to be able to keep up, jumping, head banging, switching from one singing style to the other: as an anime character, as a siren, like a Macho hard rocker, begging as a R&B singer. With band or acoustically on her own, from incomprehensible experiments to punky anger in ‘Ok Furikake’, in which she disappeared barefoot between the audience.

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