Review: Queens of Soul: The Legends at Ellington Jazz Club

Queens of Soul: The Legends featuring Claire Fahie at Ellington Jazz Club
Saturday, January 18, 2025

Fringe World is now up and running, and Northbridge has come alive. The streets at night are fuelled with energy and excitement, with parks and performance venues filling up.

A little further from the centre, The Ellington Jazz Club is pulsing with two shows every weeknight, three on Friday, and five on Saturday. Most shows are running for a minimum season of three nights, often in different timeslots, while some of the more agile and diverse performers are putting on more than one program.

Claire Fahie sits in this last category. She has three shows in this year’s Fringe. Her first, Queens of Soul, opened last Saturday and is running again this Thursday (the 23rd) and Saturday (25th). If you are a fan of classic soul or just love to dance to a really tight, funky band, this is the show for you.

Fahie’s nine-piece ensemble, The Legends, are superb. Featuring Jarrad Van Dort on electric guitar, the Flamenco brothers, Norberto and Tommi, on keys and bass, Alex Baker on drums, a two-piece horn section (trumpet and sax) of Sam Timmerman and Jeremy Trezona, and dual backing vocalists, Jordan Anthony and Sharni Cumming. With Fahie on lead vocals, they make an airtight unit that blast out a slick, often startling sound. Formed through ‘the WAAPA grads network,’ as Fahie put it, that font of fantastic music, they all studied at the Academy during the mid twenty-teens.

In the course of the show, each player took a turn to solo—tastefully. There were no round robins, solo on solo on solo; instead, in the course of the hour, each player featured at most twice. That’s the restraint and discipline soul music demands. But even so, it is really Fahie’s band. She led them with her dynamic vocals and frequent bouts of on-stage conducting—a glance to herald a solo, an arm held high to signal the last round. It was effortless and integrated, the sign of a well-polished band who are used to playing with each other and know instinctively how to follow the leader and fly together.

Their repertoire lived up to the show’s name. All the soul queens were represented: Aretha Franklin, Etta James, Gladys Knight, Nina Simone, Dusty Springfield, Joss Stone, Renee Geyer, Adele, Annie Lennox. As with the intro, Think/Chain of Fools, some songs were medlied together to squeeze in yet more sensational music. With swift, precise inter-song banter—the barest detail to tease your imagination, a nod to the soloists—the fifteen songs packed out the hour.

Some songs were arranged by Fahie and the band, but most of them were taken from the original diva versions filtered through the rehearsal process. Light and dark with all the shades in between, slow sultry ballads, fast funky anthems, the soul of soul on full display.

Among the night’s many highlights were the great horn riff and walking bass on Etta James’ I Just Wanna Make Love to You; Norberto Flamenco’s slowed-down middle eight on Son of a Preacher Man and his funky organ intro to It’s A Man’s World; the syncopated call and response vocals on Natural Woman and Midnight Train to Georgia; Van Dort’s spy guitar and Timmerman’s tremolo trumpet on I Put A Spell on You, and Fahie’s unaccompanied first verse of Feelin Good that ended in a dramatic, on-beat jump into the full band.

The show ended with an energetic encore of Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves, with each of the three singers taking turns to lead a verse. The full house pumped, with the entire audience on its feet dancing.

It’s what you’d expect from a woman who has pretty well grown up in soul music. Fahie’s parents were big soul fans who amassed a massive record collection of all the greats. As a young girl, Fahie would raid their CD rack, take her favourite albums into her bedroom, and devour their depths. She started out learning piano and trumpet, but when it became apparent that their fifteen-year-old daughter’s true destiny was singing, her parents sent her off to lessons with renowned vocal coach Annie Neal. Not only did Neal teach Fahie how to reach the right notes, but she also further fuelled her fascination for soul music by passing on her passion for Etta James and Aretha Franklin.

At WAAPA, Fahie completed a Bachelor of Music (Contemporary) with a major in popular performance and sub-unit in arranging. On graduating, she scored the perfect ‘day’ job as front of house manager at The Ellington. There’s a strong tradition of female singers working the floor at The Ellington. Simone Craddock, the current program director, and Janelle Ashley, former front of house manager, are two that spring to mind and whose stage work has been reviewed in these pages.

Eventually, Fahie decided to spread her wings and try other scenes. After a residency at the Mandarin Oriental’s five-star Jazz & Blues Club in Hong Kong, she relocated to Sydney, where she now lives. In between gracing the stage of Sydney’s lively jazz scene, she has a day job as an associate producer at the Opera House. As well as the various clubs—most notably The Witches Brew, where she performs her original material—she occasionally plays on the ferries and other boats cruising the harbour. But every year she swings back to Perth to present a show or five at Fringe World.

She has been performing in the festival for five years now and has been awarded for her efforts in the annual Fringe-first program. Her 2025 offering, which also includes Postmodern Prohibition Extravaganza (classic jazz interpretations) and Studio 54 (disco), both at the Ellington, is her smallest Fringe program in recent years.

But it’s not all about quantity. Even with a smaller platter, Fahie presents a diversity of high quality music. Her dynamic voice rings out over the sweet and sultry sounds of her extraordinary band. Find out for yourself at the Queens of Soul shows this week.

Tickets available through Fringe World and The Ellington. Get in quickly as they will surely sell out.

IAN LILBURNE

Photos by Alan Holbrook