FRANK YAMMA / LLEUWEN STEFFAN | LIVE REVIEW
Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, Thurs 23 Apr
One of the advantages of listening to music in a language that is unfamiliar is that it allows the chance to focus on the subtle changes of rhythm, melody and tone that allows the sound to become something more then just another song. Performing in the black box of the Chapter theatre space, both Frank Yamma and Lleuwen Steffan played beautiful, soaring and poignant songs in a mixture of their indigenous language and adopted or second tongues. Both Yamma and Steffan created a potent intimacy with the audience but in very different ways.
Steffan started the evening with her wistful, lilting sound, influenced by both Welsh traditional hymns but also a folk/jazz style that was most evident on tracks like Paid A Sôn and Cawell Fach Y Galon. Brought up in North Wales in a musical household (her father being the renowned Welsh singer-songwriter Steve Eaves), Steffan has lived for several years in Brittany and is now fluent in Breton. Her latest album, Tân, has a mixture of Welsh and Breton songs, of which Ar Goulou Bev was the highlight of the set. Reminiscent in vocal delivery of contemporaries Beth Orton and Kathryn Williams, Lleuwen Steffan’s delightful songs of love and loss deserve to be heard by a wider audience.
Following Steffan was Frank Yamma, an initiated Pitjantjatjara man who brought a different intensity to the stage, one built on years of experience imprinted into his soulful, growling voice and quite extraordinary guitar playing. With songs from his critically acclaimed albums Countryman (2010) and Uncle (2014), Yamma took a transfixed audience on a journey into the Australian central desert. Having grown up in Alice Springs not more than a few hundred miles from the sacred Uluru or Ayers Rock, Yamma’s songs are more than just a tourist window into another world. Their lyrical power comes from anger at how alcoholism is destroying the lives of young Aboriginal children in One Lonely Night, or the tribulations of casual racism in Black Man Crying. Make More Spear is a stunning song lamenting the loss of the Aboriginal way of life, destroyed by alcoholism and poverty, and a call to arms to reconnect to the old ways – “we are the people of this land”.
Some of the songs in Pitjantjatjara, like Coolibah and Nguta, resonate with grace and power, whilst Yamma’s sense of rhythm and timing in his guitar playing is tinged with the ghosts of old time Delta bluesmen like Lead Belly and Lightnin’ Hopkins, mixed with traditional folk ballads and a little bit of reggae thrown in on songs like Down The River. Yamma finishes with possibly his most well known song, the plaintive and mysterious ballad She Cried, which begins with a yearning for death but ends with an elegiac affirmation of life. Frank Yamma and Lleuwen Steffan’s performances made me realise that, despite the differences in language and culture, we are all uniquely connected to the experience of what it means to be human.
words ALEX WREN photos NOEL DACEY