Nikka Costa – World Café Live – Philadelphia (A PopEntertainment.com Concert Review)

Nikka Costa – World Café Live – Philadelphia PA – October 21, 2008

At Nikka Costa’s new tour they were selling t-shirts with a lightning bolt and 70s-styled fat fonts which read “The return of the funky white bitch.”

After watching Costa stalk the boards for nearly two hours all I can say is “Hallelujah! Yea, she is back!” Costa, the daughter of jazz legend Don Costa (Frank Sinatra was her Godfather) has deep-fried soul down to the core.

She is a funky diva in the tradition of Tina Turner, Chaka Khan, Millie Jackson, Patti Labelle and a number of soul mamas. She is a singer out of time – if she were around in the 60s or 70s, she’d have been huge.

Instead, after two critically acclaimed but mostly overlooked major label releases she comes back swinging on a smaller label – but it is a revived, legendary soul label, Stax, home of Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Booker T and the MGs and Isaac Hayes. Her album may not have as much corporate backing, but it’s got just as much fire.

This do-it-yourself credo is achieved in her latest live gigs (which she referred to as an Obama-styled grass roots tour) in which Costa testified and screamed, jammed, cooed, burned, crammed and creamed.

With a whip-tight backing band full of brassy horns and enough wocka-wocka guitar magic to make Isaac Hayes blush, Costa sizzled with a retro abandon that more mannered current divas would just envy. She even lost herself so much in the encore ballad “I Wish I Loved You Less” that she teasingly slipped her hand deep inside her pants – but it wasn’t gratuitous and dirty, it was fun and frisky.

She’d tell her guitarist “Gimme some of that chicken shit” and get a scratching funky sound straight outta a blaxploitation flick. Songs like the almost-hit “Everybody Got Their Something,” “Keep Pushing,” “Cry Baby” and “Happy in the Morning” built up a playful soulful sweat that got every booty bumpin’.

The funky white bitch is back!

Testify!

Jay S. Jacobs