Gig review: Laura Mvula, Glasgow

Mvula is not wanting in talent, so improvisation is probably the least of her skills. Her arrangements – drawing on jazz, gospel, Afro pop and classical choral traditions – are sophisticated and striking, but often deceptively sparse.

She can extrapolate music from simple handclaps, or cover Michael Jackson’s Human Nature with just her brother James backing her with a bare cello part.

Mvula is not really a pop writer and, if anything, the material from her forthcoming album The Dreaming Room is further out-there than before, more sonically interesting than melodically satisfying. Yet, despite the unexpectedness of her compositions, she has a knack for communication.

Being a choirmistress in her spare time, her vocal arrangements, as delivered by a trio of siren backing singers, were ravishing, but she couldn’t resist also roping in the audience for a number of singalongs – not the lusty terrace bellowing which usually passes for crowd participation at gigs, but rhythmic, repetitive reveries which had the room in raptures.