In her spectacularly successful career to date, the composer and vocalist Caroline Shaw has already collaborated with an astonishingly wide range of performers, from Kanye West to Anne Sofie von Otter. And in 2021 she released two albums with Sō Percussion, the four-piece ensemble who, like Shaw, gleefully trample across the boundaries of musical genres, and who constantly provoke reassessments of what a percussion group can do.
Together they have been touring a set drawn from those two albums, Narrow Sea and Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part; Milton Court was the final date on that tour. Narrow Sea takes texts from a 19th-century hymnal, but this selection was dominated by numbers from Let the Soil, for which Shaw culled her words from sources including James Joyce’s Ulysses, Anne Carson’s poetry, 18th-century spirituals, even the chorus of an Abba song, as well as using lyrics of her own, to create settings that have clear links with US singer-songwriters – Suzanne Vega came to mind at one point – but with the much wider American folk tradition too.
Sometimes Sō Percussion add complex rhythmic and chordal layers to Shaw’s voice, sometimes she duets with a single instrumentalist; in the Abba setting, Lay All Your Love on Me, for instance, a solo marimba wraps itself around the vocal line, which slows down the original riff until it is virtually unrecognisable, becoming something utterly timeless. There seems a confessional tinge to many of Shaw’s songs, but something strikingly beautiful about many of them too.
Earlier Sō had played three pieces composed for them, all slickly exploiting the group’s knack of seeking out new ways of expanding their percussive sound world. Angélica Negrón’s Gone (2020) and Go Back, composed this year, use robotic instruments to lay further rhythmic layers on to ambient backgrounds, the first doomy and forbidding, the second outward going and dance-like. Julia Wolfe’s Forbidden Love uses the instruments of a string quartet as her sound sources, but has the percussionists play them with thimbles, chopsticks and lengths of cord; string players might be horrified, but the sounds are fresh and always inventive.
