Ngaiire at the Redstone Room -- May 2.
Tuesday, May 2, 7 p.m.
The Redstone Room, 129 Main Street, Davenport IA
With Atwood magazine calling her "expansive and expressive, immersive and wondrous," the Australian-based R&B and future-soul singer/songwriter Ngaiire performs a May 2 headlining concert at Davenport's Redstone Room, the Quad City Arts Visiting Artist's most recent album 3 lauded by The Guardian as a "radiant and rich" recording that "meets the artist on her own terms.”
Hailing from the Eastern Highlands and New Ireland provinces of Papua New Guinea, though now based in Sydney, Australia, Ngaiire has a career that crosses genres, mediums, and expectations. Her sound melds electronic neo-soul, gospel, and big pop sounds strained through the lens of a First Nations Papua New Guinean songwriter, and touring as part of a six-piece ensemble, Ngaiire’s shows give the audience the full spectrum of live performances: one moment will be a pop banger, and in the next, she'll break your heart. Her musical career commenced in 2003 with an enrollment in a bachelor of Jazz Studies at the Central Queensland University, and in 2004, she competed in the second season of Australian Idol, where she competed as a semi-finalist. She then worked with Blue King Brown and Paul Mac as a session vocalist before re-focusing on her solo career in 2008. In an interview with Australian Stage, Mac consequently described Ngaiire as a "diminutive bomb of goodness."
Ngaiire released her debut studio album Lamentations in July of 2013, its title inspired by a combination of Henry Purcell's Dido's Lament and the Book of Lamentations, as prior to finishing the album, the artist damaged her spine in a car accident and experienced the death of two close relatives. The album received laudatory reviews, and at the 9th Australian Music Prize ceremony, Lamentations was nominated the Most Highly Regarded Album in 2013 and ranked at number 27 by Faster Louder on the 2013 Critics list and number 25 on the Readers List. Released in 2016, Ngaiire's Blastoma earned even stronger kudos, with Howl & Echoes calling it "a carefully considered, cohesive and dynamic album" and The Interns raving that the work "form[ed] a happy marriage of old soul, experimentation, and futuristic vision." With her third album, fittingly titled 3, released in 2021, Ngaiire's music is rooted in a resurgent Australian Neo-Soul movement, and she was listed as one of Australia's leading live R&B and soul performs by the AU Review, which called the artist "the beating heart of the contemporary live music scene in Australia." She has been compared to such disparate talents as Jeff Buckley, Hiatus Kaiyote, Kimbra, and Angie Stone, and her collaborations span multiple genres including experimental jazz, contemporary synth and electro-pop, Melanesian string band, roots, blues, and world music, as well as hip hop, rap, and future bass.
Ngaiire and her six-piece ensemble play the Redstone Room at Common Chord on May 2, admission to the 7 p.m. concert event is $10-15, and more information and tickets are available by calling (563)326-1333 and visiting CommonChordQC.com and QuadCityArts.com.
