Brittany Howard and Michael Kiwanuka Shake Central Park’s SummerStage – The Village Voice

We lucky New Yorkers get a boost in stretching out those last days of perhaps the most fun season (barring wildfires, floods, etc.) from SummerStage, in Central Park. This year, the festival aimed to highlight “forward-thinking women pushing boundaries.” Last Thursday night, with opener Yasmin Williams and headliner Brittany Howard — a thoughtful Michael Kiwanuka right in sync between them — boundaries were completely making a run for it. (Even the stage, under a “tent” that looked like a UFO, refused to be stereotyped.)

I hadn’t heard of Williams, a 27-year-old guitarist who both fingerpicks and taps on the strings. She told the audience that she developed her method of percussive playing — with her instrument lying on her lap — after excelling on Guitar Hero II as a kid; that position for the controller increased her speed. From her first crystalline phrases on “Cliffwalk,” which begins her new album, Acadia, it was clear she had retained and refined that rapidity, all in the service of beautiful, even meditative melody. On “Hummingbird,” she played as though her fingers were those tiny birds urgently needing to get to the next alluring flower, and with “Juvenescence” she created a waterfall of gorgeous sound. She dexterously played both guitar and kalimba for “Guitka,” but saved the big finish for her virtuosic “Restless Heart,” her hands decisively coming down at the end — as though making musical exclamation points — on those evocative strings.

Williams left us on a lovely high, but we were about to experience two seasoned artists who do not shy away from pain — individual and global — in their work. In 2017, Kiwanuka’s despairing “Cold Little Heart” (the heart in question is the singer’s own) became the theme song for the TV series Big Little Lies. At the time I assumed it was an overlooked but classic R&B track from the ’60s. That haunting, sensuous song transformed a then 29-year-old singer-songwriter, largely unknown outside his native England, into a star. 

We could see the amalgam that Howard has become: somehow keeping that rawness, even as she has taken on a kind of elegance. 

And so as the evening darkened, the peoplescape, from my bleachers’ vantage point, changed from reclining figures on blankets to a sea of heads all the way to the stage. To cheers and applause, Kiwanuka walked out from the wings in a loose whitish suit, immediately getting down to business with “Lowdown (part i)” in that soulful, sometimes raspy voice: “Make my way through the night / To the so-called jubilee.” The audience was now in a jubilee of feeling — the sea of heads swayed as though creating waves — his music not just giving us something but pulling something from us as well, as the best songs do. With an eight-piece band behind him and his piercing guitar, Kiwanuka went on to perform such songs as “Hero,” with an almost scary shuddering percussive break midway, befitting its subject of racist murders; the naked plea for help “Rule the World,” with an electrifying turn from backup singer Emily Holligan; and, of course, “Cold Little Heart,” its intro background “oooh”s taking us into swooning territory. Throughout the set intriguing images appeared on a large screen behind the group, beginning with a baby’s face, perhaps messaging the title of Kiwanuka’s forthcoming album, Small Changes. He closed with the tormented yet defiant “Love & Hate,” which echoed “Cold Little Heart” in subtle piano riffs but featured a screaming electric guitar. It felt like a cathartic ending: “Calling all the people here to see the show / Calling for my demons now to let me go,” Kiwanuka sang.

He had already told us, “I love this city. New York is a special place.”

It was about to get even more special. As with Kiwanuka, I was stunned by Brittany Howard when I first heard her. With the song “Hold On,” from 2012, she blew in like a southern hurricane, a force of nature barely able to contain her power. She put the shake in her band Alabama Shakes and shook out any preconceived idea of how a frontwoman should look or sound. More recently, with the band now on indefinite hiatus, she’s released two solo albums, Jaime and the recent, genre-bending What Now.

When she took the stage on Thursday, amid color-changing, streaking lights and clouds of smoke, Howard, wearing a shimmering caftan, began in Ella Fitzgerald–esque tones with a song from the new album called “I Don’t,” but her voice grew more intense as soon as she strapped on a guitar. In the songs that followed, we could see the amalgam, so to speak, that Howard has become: somehow keeping that rawness, even as she has taken on a kind of elegance. At any moment, a dulcet high note could give way to a searing growl or a cut-off howl — as it did when she performed “Baby” (after asking us, “How many of y’all are brokenhearted right now?” Judging by the reaction, quite a few). In “Another Day,” she prowled the stage, taking along her two black-clad backup singers while clapping, dancing, throwing up her hands, and snarling like a cat; she urged amity in these rough times: “If we can get this shit together / Then what could we make?” And she literally preached in a spoken-word piece ending with an insistent “We’re all brothers and sisters!” Everything came to a head in her frenzied rendition of Nina Simone’s 1969 answer to the Beatles’ “Revolution.” (Simone found John Lennon’s lyrics about activism too negative, revamping with such lines as “Some folks are gonna get the notion / I know they’ll say I’m preachin’ hate / But if I have to swim the ocean / Well I will just to communicate.”)

At that point, if Howard had climbed into the UFO, I for one would have followed her. 

But we still needed to hear the Prince-like “Power to Undo” and the ultra-rhythmic “What Now,” with its irresistible repeated line “I ain’t sorry.” And Howard couldn’t leave without a nod to the festival: For an encore, she and her seven-piece band performed a revelatory cover of Seals & Crofts’ “Summer Breeze,” with a syncopated guitar wafting it along and Howard letting her voice soar into the stratosphere. ❖

Mary Lyn Maiscott has written about music for Vanity Fair and other publications. An NYC-based singer-songwriter, she has a new song, “Jezebel,” with the lyric “Dance to Kiwanuka in the pale moonlight,” out as a digital single October 10.