Brian Slattery Photos
Alyssa.
As the news Wednesday night filled with reports of war, two vital musicians — Shanell Alyssa and Riki Stevens — brought a deep sense of peace to the Cafe Nine stage at State and Crown.
“Sorry to interrupt your conversation,” Riki Stevens said, and received immediate applause from the crowd. She smiled back. “You don’t even know if I’m good!” she said. The next few seconds showed she was. With a mix of covers and originals, the Norwalk-based artist quickly and easily won over the audience. Her covers (of, for instance, Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly with His Song” by way of the Fugees, or Beyoncé’s “Halo”) stayed true to the originals while she found her own place within them, showcasing a voice that could be smooth and soothing, yet with an upper register that could fill the room.
As she moved to her originals, Steven got even more emotive. “I don’t have a lot of dancing songs,” she said of her own material. “I have a lot of feeling songs, so feel with me.” Her first song, an apology for a good man she realized she let down, showed a raw, vulnerable side to her, while her stunning “Black Boy,” a plea for Black people’s safety in the face of violence, found Stevens’s voice at its most melismatic, in a mode that utterly fit the concerns of the song.
She brought the audience in with a simple song she explained she had written for a class she teaches. “It really warms my heart to have music that is easy to learn and meaningful,” she said, “I hope that you’ll sing along with me — will you?” The audience was ready, and Stevens found a crowd-pleasing key that everyone could sing in (“I learned that in church,” she said) and taught them the catchy chorus. Then, when she sang, “when I look back and wonder how I got through,” the audience responded: “It was love, it was love that carried me.”
“I’m glad to be here. I’m glad that you’re all here,” Shanell Alyssa said with genuine warmth at the beginning of her set. The mission behind the Windsor-based musician’s music was evident from her demeanor. Trained as a clinical mental health counselor and music therapist, Alyssa had written her music to speak to people’s hopes and pains, and help them with whatever they may be going through. Her first song intoned the line “I’m finding my way back to life,” and the unfolding music elucidated the journey to get there, especially as she moved to the song’s rap section. Another song was about living in the moment; “tomorrow’s not promised. Who knows what will happen in the next few minutes?” she said.
Like Stevens, Alyssa hooked the crowd fast, but in a different, cooler way. When she asked “y’all still rocking with me?” she was met with enthusiastic cheers. She filled some of the time between the songs with gentle humor.
“You know when you want to sing a song but then the person before you sings it?” she said, tuning her guitar. The audience laughed. “Has that ever happened to you?” she asked Stevens from the stage.
“No!” Stevens said.
“Me neither,” Alyssa said. “But if it did, I’d probably sing it anyway, and then make you all judge.” As Alyssa moved into an Alicia Keys song, Stevens harmonized with her from the audience. Another song was “just a cry out for freedom in light of everything that’s going on in the world today,” she added.
Toward the end of her set, she spelled her mission out. “I call my music ‘rise above’ music,” she said. “I believe we have a duty to rise above all the world tells us we are” to arrive at “the truth of who we are.” She moved into her next song, which had the refrain “I am more than what I see, and I am who I’m meant to be.” From song to song, she convinced the audience, too. By the end, when she sang, they sang with her, and when she asked for a beat, they clapped their hands. Everyone was rising together.