Inside Karim Kamar’s Set at Shoreditch Treehouse
Written by Jude Blue
Sat on the hardwood floors of Shoreditch Treehouse, waiting for Karim Kamar to start his set, I was having the same thought – as it turned out – as everybody else. How did they get a grand piano up here?
For context, Shoreditch Treehouse is a loft, four floors up, off Charlotte Street Road in EC2A. To access the top floor, we had to climb a narrow set of stairs. These stairs were barely wide enough to fit an upright piano, much less a grand piano bigger than my car – a 2012 VW polo.
Somebody had the conscience to ask the MC, who passed the question to a member of the bar staff, who had a simple and, as it turned out, obvious answer: the piano came through the window.
Yep. It came through the window and they paid (only) £55 to close the street, winching the instrument onto the fourth floor. Pretty cool. Since then, the piano had remained, waiting to be played by Karim Kamar – a contemporary classical pianist and composer.
Kamar seems to be influenced by artists such as Ludovico Einaudi, and the four songs he played all demonstrated this inspiration – with the original songs, “Ice Skaters”, from his album “Winter Etudes”, and “Murmuration”, convincing me of his intention to contribute to the modern corpus of New Age solo piano music. His cover of “Hallelujah” seemed a song all its own – rejecting Leonard Cohen’s melancholy performance, choosing instead to imbue the song with the grandiosity only intimated by the original, delivering it with the technical tricks that have made Kamar so popular on social media. Cohen’s voice, in this song, seemed almost emulated by the low foghorn tones of Kamar’s accompanying cellist. Moving on to Kamar’s cover of “Hey Jude”, the vocal and instrumental parts were inverted, with the cello occupying the song’s lower registers and Kamar’s key playing imitating McCartney’s excitable vocals, if you can imagine his hey judey-judey-judey-judey being drummed out on the upper octaves.
Personally, I think Kamar’s most enjoyable approach to the piano can be found in his covers of popular music. His covers of “Redbone”, by Childish Gambino and “Without Me”, by Halsey, speak to the contemporary musical landscape – a world where musicians have to tirelessly plug themselves online, performing songs that must achieve the furthest online reach. For a classical musician, whose inspiration might draw from composers long gone with a limited number of popular compositions in their oeuvre, this poses a challenge. But Kamar seamlessly interpolates modern popular music into his classical-inspired set. The performance was an easy listen – his performance of “Hey Jude” reminding me of the rendition performed from a toy music box somebody gifted me as a baby.
That said, Kamar’s own songwriting is very impressive, and visibly moved members of the audience. “Ice Skaters” and “Murmurations” both draw on classical music’s recent influence by filmic, jazz-reading composers, such as Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yann Tiersen. These songs wore their influence by these writers on their sleeve and obviously pleased the audience – who seemed to appreciate these grand, filmic songs. It was a set that reminded the room how timeless modern piano can sound.