LIVE: Jesca Hoop / Rihab Azar – Howard Assembly Room, Leeds, 17.05.2024

Welcome to Lau-Land, Leeds edition. The music festival organized by the popular trio Lau previously saw action last October in their hometown of Edinburgh, as well as a smaller incarnation just a few weeks ago on the Isle of Skye in the Inner Hebrides. But now it’s the turn of this West Yorkshire town and the prestigious Howard Assembly Hall to host this exciting event.

A weekend full of concerts, workshops, sessions and a ceilidh awaits you. And it all starts tonight Jesca Hoopthe Californian musician who now lives just over the Pennines in Manchester, courtesy of London-based Syrian/British oud player, Rihab Azar Rehab azar.

Rihab Azar opens Lau-Land in Leeds with an exquisite exhibition of solo oud works through a series of his own compositions. She creates a spell out of spontaneity and improvisation with this fretless, pear-shaped instrument – lute-like in appearance – while striking a beautiful balance between tradition and dreamlike experimentation. She concludes with “Resistance”an exhilarating exercise in transcendental concentration.

When Jesca Hoop was last here in the Howard Assembly Room 18 months ago, she was joined by her long-time musical collaborator Kirana Peyton on bodhrán and guitar and Chloe Foye on bass guitar and keyboards. This time he flies solo, except for two guitars and a few songs, when he is joined by the three boys from Lau – Chris Drever (the guitar), Aidan O’Rourke (fiddler) and fresh from his amazing performance of Split the air with the Grimethorpe Colliery Band in Gateshead last Sunday, Martin Green (accordion).

Her lonely nature magnifies certain elements of Jesca Hoop’s vulnerability, her acute sensitivity to the world she finds herself in, and much of the despondency she feels towards it. As soon as Hoop gave a hard, almost desperate look “Hate has a mother” then ask the rhetorical question “If we are all made of the same stuff, all fundamentally the same, how do we manage to create such unsafe environments?”

Before Jesca Hoop’s Encore – A Soulful Revision of Her 2009 Album’s Title Track Hunt for the Dress – longs for a simpler life, wistfully remembering the time he lived outdoors in a raspberry bush in the high mountain deserts of Arizona. Between these extremes of the set spectrum, she takes us on an often extremely powerful sonic odyssey through the intelligently articulated sex education of “Out of Eden”; the abandoned feeling of being somehow out of time on “Free of Feeling”, where he is joined by Lau; and the recycled mime a “pound birds” this underlines the fact that, by her own admission, Jesca Hoop likes it “Get away from the ideas you’ve made about life.”

Jesca Hoop’s world is not conventional and remains a true outlier operating on the perimeters of contemporary music. She’s also painfully honest, with the occasional out-of-tune guitar, the odd touch of tramp here and there, and forgetting the words to a song only adds to the raw authenticity of this absorbing occasion. At one point, she reminds us that “I told you I have memory problems…but tell me you forgive me.” Of course, Jesca. We wouldn’t have you otherwise.

Photographs: Simon Godley

More photos from Lau-Land in Leeds feat. Jesca Hoop and Rihab Azar