Northern Sky at the Tuesday Night Music Club … Comrades’ club

Northern Sky at the Tuesday Night Music Club … Comrades’ club

Review Written by Nigel Foster Images By Ken Jackson

WhichNorthern Sky – The Tuesday Night Music Club. This review was written by Nigel Foster and shared with his permission. It felt so good being back at the club for the first time this year. It was lovely to see and chat to dear friends, and of course the music on offer was of high quality. The artists that shared their music with us were a relatively new band, Northern Sky, which featured the husband and wife duo of Ray Qureshi and Yoka Qureshi-Kuiper, supplemented by drums, bass and keyboards.

The fluteWith Ray and Yoka, it is also a marriage of considerable talents. Ray is a superb guitarist, and he also happens to make many of the guitars he plays because he is an experienced luthier. Ray used one of his own instruments for most of the gig, and it had a beautiful tone. Yoka is a genuine multi-instrumentalist, as she is very adept at flute and saxophone and equally so as a vocalist.

feeling. Together the duo also write and record material, and their own compositions feature heavily in the band’s opening set. As the quintet took to the stage, their opening salvo of Voodoo Woman and Save Me was bursting with the blues with lashings of soul and feeling. Voodoo Woman featured some funky grooves that lay under Yoka’s melodic but powerful voice, and Ray’s contribution was the sharp and hooked-up lead breaks. Save Me followed swiftly on and revealed its true blues coda with the rhythm section laying out a thick and clean vibe, and Ray dropped a funky, fuzzed-up but clipped solo over the keys and rhythm section, and Yoka’s voice swayed with sonics.

If you love your blues laced with some serious funk, then you would have loved Nothing’s Changed; I know I loved it with the drums and bass pumping away, giving Ray a platform to chop a slashing, hard riff that moved into a reverb-driven and clipped solo. Yoka switched to a soul-inflected vocal to match the funk, and then for the first time she picked up the flute and eased out a sweet melody of floating notes. The first cover of the evening appeared in the form of a hard-edged blues rocker, You’ll Never Change, a Samantha Fish number, and the band did it justice with the rhythm section pulsing out a serious groove overlaid with flourishing keys and a bruising riff that all wrapped around Yoka’s powerful vocals.

The band was introduced in turn during See What You Want, and a little cameo from each ensued, and it was all framed in some more fiery funk before Ray broke ranks to flood out a slashed, edgy solo. The title Still In Love With You gave us a big clue that this might be a ballad, and yes, it absolutely was; slow, low, and soft drum and bass lines opened a space for some subtle piano patterns, and Yoka caught the mood with a tender, lovelorn vocal delivery.

The blues standard Stormy Monday brought the first set to a close in some style, with Yoka reaching deep to put lots of soul into her voice that gradually climbed to a passionate howl, matching the passion and power of the guitar and piano solos that took us to the break. To ensure the momentum of the first set was not lost, the band launched into the groove-laden Fine And Mellow that swept Yoka’s voice upwards, and Ray dropped in an incessant, hooked riff.

Yoka introduced Little Boy Lost as a blues composition that she herself wrote, and as the music unfolded, it was evident this was real blues drenched in emotion and feel captured in her deep vocal and then the evocative beauty of a searching saxophone solo with the notes rising from the brass instrument into the atmosphere.

The pace quickened, but the passion dropped not a jot as the band eased into the soulful and bluesy ‘Soulshine’. Of course, this is an Allman Brothers number, and anything they wrote and performed was high class, and Northern Sky had that high class in their interpretation, and Ray shone with textured guitar lines, and Yoka laid out a bluesy atmospheric vocal before drawing us in to sing along, and, of course, we obliged. Empty Promises was a real highlight for me as it was an amalgam of a slow-burning deep groover that then morphed into a serious and furious groove fest with the band joining together in perfect unison.

The punchy Are You Gonna Play was a delight, the bright bounce of the music illustrating the importance of taking your chance in life. Yoka then took time out to introduce I Keep Hoping; clearly she and Ray wanted to draw attention to this one, as it was dedicated to two dearly departed friends and serious musicians, the mercurial duo Jules Fothergill and Matt Long.

The poignancy was clear as Jules’s mum and both of Matt’s parents were in the audience. Suffice it to say the boys would have loved this as the band hit the heights on a richly textured ballad with powerful and evocative instrumentation nestling beside the heartfelt vocal delivery.

The clock had then beaten Northern Sky, and there was only time for one more number, but they were only ever going to end in style with a vibrant delivery of Bright Lights. Northern Sky are a new band, but you would never have known that from the quality of the performance, and I am sure all of us present look forward to when the band release their first album. It really was good for me to be back in this community and amongst so many friends. Richard and Roz, of course, so much of that is down to you.