Jalen Ngonda turned Pori Jazz into a soul-soaked summer highlight, drawing a packed crowd and delivering a set that moved from soaring falsetto to doo-wop elegance, marking him as a headliner in the making.
Jalen Ngonda is welcomed to Pori with loud cheers from Helsinki.
Asked how many of the crowd were from the capital, a majority of hands go up. Ngonda and his band take the stage, facing a hundred-headed crowd on a warm evening with a mild breeze, surrounded by the smells of Asian and Mediterranean food stalls.
Yet the 32-year-old American-British modern Soul King could be a headliner, staring out at a hillside packed with people from the main stage. Mark my words: one day he will.
Ngonda opens with “That’s All I Wanted From You” from his debut Come Around And Love Me (2023), clearing the air with his soaring falsetto.“Burning Temptation” follows, from the June-released second album Doctrine of Love.
The song’s smeared in Motown tinge, and it may make you wonder if Ngonda drives around in a red Cadillac and clacks away with a typewriter. According to a recent interview, he doesn’t.
It’s just about the music. 1960s and 1970s soul is his thing, his obsession, and Pori is better for it—because by the fifth song, the set lands on an absolute cold-chill-banger: “Just As Long As We’re Together.”
The tune was released as a single for streaming services last year’s winter but has a warm summer night written all over it. It’s a song that finds a place in your heart but, alas, not in the DJ bag. There are people who would swim across the Pori river to a deserted rock stacked with 45s for a physical copy.
“Anyone In Love” comes next. It’s the opening track of the latest outing, and the crowd knows it. The finger-snapping rhythm and mellow vibe have them swaying, humming, sipping white wine—soaking up the dog days of summer to the fullest.
Ngonda finishes the song with an orchestral caesura, singing solo from low register to the upper, sparking spontaneous screams of female voices and a couple of urgent male roars.
“Pori Jazz! How we feeling? Feeling good?” Ngonda asks between the songs. The crowd answers with a burst of cheers. “I keep hitting my teeth with this microphone,” Ngonda says. “I will not have two front teeth by the end of this gig if this keeps going on.”
“I Can’t Ever Leave You” from his latest follows. “You won my heart just like a game of cards . . . You treat me like a dog does a shoe / And after a while I’m torn . . . But I can’t ever leave you.”
“One of the finest moments is Ngonda’s interpretation of “The Look of Love”—the Burt Bacharach classic, though to this journalist, it remains better known through Dusty Springfield’s solo version and Janis Hansen’s cooing with Sergio Mendes.
Ngonda discards any traces of bossa nova and injects the moving song with doo-wop, playing solo on the keys . . . just the man and the piercing voice.
Just the crowd, and the erupting cheers.
