Shaz Oye at the Riverbank House Hotel

It was a tribute to both the dynamism of her live presence, and the openness of an audience really here to see bill-topper Juliet Turner, that by the end of a set that made few concessions to three-chord trickery, Shaz Oye had the audience clapping and singing along to an acappella version of Wilson Pickett’s sixties hit ‘634-5789’.
That was her only non-original. In the moving ‘Child Of Original Sin’ Oye reflected on growing up on Dublin’s North Strand as a black kid, while ‘Killing Time’ offered her sympathetic reflections on the mother of a death row victim. ‘Break Of Day’ had a stirring field-song feel to it, and ‘All A Woman Has’, despite missing the production and accompaniment of the version on her Child Of Original Sin EP, had a raunch and a rasp you don’t meet every day.
But in ‘Lady Sings The Blues’ Oye really rattled and hummed, reducing a rapt, packed audience to reverential silence. Oye’s voice, accompanied by her expressive guitar playing, is extraordinarily sturdy from so frail a frame and has all the weight of a Leonard Cohen or a Nick Cave allied to the swooping flexibility of Kate Bush. She may have to work a little at introducing a lighter timbre into the show to make for more light and shade, but, that reservation aside, this was an impressive performance by any standard.
jackie hayden