Gavin Bryars and Tom Waits first met in the 1980s, and struck up a rapport which led to Waits recording new vocals for Bryars’ 1971 piece Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet. Bryars’ Mercy and Grand project is a further incarnation of the pair’s musical sympathy, with Bryars leading an eight-piece ensemble through a selection of Tom Waits/ Kathleen Brennan compositions alongside some Kurt Weill, the occasional tango and a blast of Nino Rota.
Waits was present merely in spirit, however, and his gravelly seafarer’s bark was replaced in Shoreditch Church by Jessica Walker’s agile and dramatic mezzo-soprano.
Or most of the time at least, since the performance was punctuated with a handful of band instrumentals. In fact they opened with one, the deliciously sleazy Gypsy Tango, which was peppered with droll quotations from I Could Have Danced All Night.
Then Ms Walker stepped up to sing Little Drop of Poison, the first of the night’s ten Waits pieces. The logic of splicing Waits and Weill together immediately became apparent when they followed up with Weill’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency, which echoed something of the former’s macabre surrealism. In the lugubrious waltz of Poor Edward, the band began to stretch out with clanky piano and a mournful brew of accordion and violin.
The spotlight fell on Bryars’ own deft double bass work in the murder mystery of Alice, while Walker extracted some rich lyrical colouring from Waits’s sea-shantyish Whistle Down The Wind (which contains the “Mercy and Grand” line).
The combo’s collective expertise was paraded to dazzling effect in their performance of Rota’s theme from Fellini’s 8½ , where they raced from placid evocations of moonlight under the stars to a screeching train wreck enhanced by blaring horns and sirens.
However, when the first half ended with the bluesy Johnsburg, Illinois, it seemed to signal a transatlantic shift in part two away from old Europe towards homespun Americana. Pony, for instance, was a slow country ballad coloured with slide guitar and backwoods fiddle, with Walker squeezing soulfulness from the plaintive lyric. Train Song, with James Woodrow cracking out a bona fide electric slide solo, was as close as the band came to rock’n’roll, though Walker’s vocal wasn’t quite raunchy enough for the occasion.
But that wasn’t all. There was a whiff of Celtic tradition in The Briar And the Rose, while Broken Bicycles evoked memories of Michel Legrand or Serge Gainsbourg. For a coda, there was the gentle yet dark Lullaby (“If I die before you wake/ Don’t you cry, don’t you weep”), then an encore of Take Me Home to make sure everybody went home feeling a little more reassured.
It was a night of crafty musical collisions and coincidences, which created an almost narcotic effect.
