Dominique Fils-Aimé looked out lovingly at the candlelit tables of Le Poisson Rouge NYC when she took the stage on January 11. Sat cross-legged on a covered platform, she introduced her musicians to the audience at the beginning rather than the end as is typically done, joking, “you don’t introduce yourself to the guests at the end of a party!”
What followed was a journey rather than a set, with Fils-Aimé asking the audience to picture various scenes to properly envision each group of songs. Further transported by the changes in lighting from green, to blue, to golden, listeners were taken from a rich, overgrown garden to the dry heat of a desert. Fils-Aimé swayed as she sang, playing with the air and flowing from one song to the next with no breaks for applause. The equivalent of our applause, she said, was simply our presence.
Each transition was also marked by her own poetry. “Inhale breath, exhale a tornado. Cry every river that leads back to your mother,” she chanted. Mixing jazz, R&B and soul into her very own sound, her voice soared to the heights and reached gritty lows over pulsing base lines running through songs like the mesmerizing “Love Will Grow Back.”
The power in her voice reached its zenith when she stood to sing hard-hitters like “Give Me A Reason” and “Cheers to New Beginnings.”Riffing and scatting, she brought her songs to climaxes that can only be appreciated in the organic moment of a live performance, earning raucous applause from the crowd.
On the home stretch, Fils-Aimé rode the wave of energy through the joyful “To Walk Away,” and closed with the primal beat of “Our Roots Run Deep.” The singer bowed and clasped her hands over her heart reminding the crowd that “Our only unlimited resource is love. We are all on the side of love and humanity.”
You can listen to Dominique Fils-Aimé’s latest album, “Our Roots Run Deep,” here on Spotify