Yaatri @ The Globe, Newcastle - July 21

(© Ken Drew)

Liam Narain DeTar (guitar); Felix Bertulis-Webb (keyboards); Rosie Miles (vocals); Joe Wilkes (bass); Dom Kilsby (drums)

GemArts' Masala Festival rocked up at the Globe to present Yaatri. In a joint promotion with Jazz North East and Newcastle Jazz Co-op, the evening would feature five accomplished young musicians roaming across a wide musical landscape. Band leader and guitarist Liam Narain DeTar fuses many influences from his British-Asian heritage to produce an Indo jazz-meets-retro jazz-rock kaleidoscopic sound. 

The one name in the Leeds-based band known to BSH was Dom Kilsby. You could say drummer Kilsby had it (the material) down. Cuts from Yaatri's Lucid album, together with several new, as yet untitled compositions, revealed the band to be just that, a band, a unit, solo flights almost entirely absent from the performance. 

(© Ken Drew)

Felix Bertulis-Webb (keyboards), introduced as being at 'the synth station', manipulated an array of electronic sounds across the band; Liam Narain DeTar stretching chord shapes to their physical limits, bassist Joe Wilkes unobtrusively 'in the pocket' and vocalist Rosie Miles soaring five hundred miles high, recalling Norma Winstone's instantly recognisable sound. Embracing some challenging time signatures, Yaatri is a band without a star soloist, the performance all about the collective sound, a sound achieved by way of some seriously tricky time signatures. Russell