Concert preview
Radio City Music Hall was built for spectacle, which makes it a particularly good place to watch Jessie Ware insist that glamour can still be intimate.
Jessie Ware performing at Eurosonic in 2012. Photo: Rene Passet/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.
Ware brings The Superbloom Tour to Radio City on Thursday, Oct. 8, with Dhruv opening. The show arrives at a useful point in her career. For years, Ware was treated as a singer with impeccable taste and an audience slightly smaller than her songs deserved. Then she stopped behaving as if restraint were a virtue.
What’s Your Pleasure? and That! Feels Good! recast her as a modern disco singer who understood that revivalism only works when it has heat. Her current album, Superbloom, keeps that instinct but gives it more room. The official track list runs through songs with titles like “Ride,” “Mr Valentine,” “Mon Amour” and “No Consequences,” language that does not waste much time pretending desire is mysterious.
A room for entrances
Radio City changes the scale of a performance before anyone sings. The proscenium is enormous, the room has the ceremonial glow of old New York, and the stage can make a pop concert feel closer to a revue. Ware is unusually well suited to that pressure. She performs with the precision of someone who understands choreography, costume and lighting as parts of the song rather than decoration around it.
That polish would be sterile if her voice did not keep puncturing it. Ware can sound cool for several bars and then lean into a phrase with something closer to pleading. The tension is part of her appeal. The music offers escape, but the singer often sounds as if she knows exactly what the escape is from.
The newer material should make that contradiction more visible. “I Could Get Used To This” and “Ride” treat pleasure as an active choice, while Ware’s recent work has increasingly blurred the line between private confession and public ceremony. The best version of the show will make Radio City feel less like a monument and more like a very elaborate nightclub.
There is also something pleasingly New York about seeing Ware in this particular room. Disco has never really left the city, but it has spent decades changing addresses. Ware does not attempt to rebuild Studio 54. She works with the memory of that world while accepting that the people on the dance floor now arrive with different histories, different anxieties and phones in their hands.
Jessie Ware: The Superbloom Tour
Thursday, Oct. 8, 8 p.m.
Radio City Music Hall, 1260 Sixth Avenue
With Dhruv
