Live Review: Fem Belling

Despite a hiccup with Kew Court House's air conditioning, Fem Belling effortlessly sweep us under the wings of her exuberant, inventive and infectiously mirthful performance from the moment she steps on stage and, together with her six-piece band, opens with a jaunty rendition of Beyonce's Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It).

"It's 'Instagram For Music' tonight," Belling says with her wide smile and a cheeky twinkle in her eye. "We take a song and apply a filter on it, and take you back to that time." But she does so much more than that. Leading a generous coterie of talented musos on the trombone, saxophone, trumpet, grand piano, double bass and drums, Belling's slightly tongue-in-cheek 'filter' aptly demonstrates the transformative powers of jazz as she elegantly bounds across genres and musical eras.

Belling gleefully plays at switching the tempos when covering famous songs, making her versions completely contrast the original arrangements and paring them back to the core. Warning the audience that this will probably be "a first for Kew Court House", she performs Kylie Minogue's Can't Get You Out Of My Head with an undercurrent of feverish hi-hats and a trumpet in the instrumental bridge. Pharrell Williams' disco vibed Happy gets a smouldering, slow-burner makeover, replete with Belling's husky vocal scatting breaking the original's dizzy tempo down to delectable, bite-sized morsels. In Belling's kitchen, she cooks up slow-food jazz.

Arctic Monkeys' garage-rock-laden I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor is reincarnated into a smooth, flirtatious number and even Eminem's Lose Yourself finds a new demographic among the many refined septuagenarians here tonight. But Belling doesn't forget the young at heart, either. With an eye-catchingly modified violin, she proves that even computer games can be jazzified by performing a brassy version of the Caribbean-style Super Mario Bros theme. 

But the highlight of this all-too-brief evening is Moving, a song Belling wrote in the wake of a string of personal challenges. "Seven or eight years ago I moved to Melbourne from London after losing - in the space of 24 hours - my house, my partner and my job. Yeah!" she punctuates with a Tony Manero-like finger point to the ceiling, her face beaming with that high-wattage smile. With raw, Macy Gray-like vocal edges, a tempered rhythm and cerebral-deep smooth grooves, this song holds us transfixed long after its final note. We even forget about the lack of air conditioning.