Does the frame change the art inside? There is something about Summer Series gigs at London's Somerset House that might subtly distort perception. This week-and-a-bit-long urban festival is set in a palatial, neoclassical riverside courtyard, long used for entertainment. Tonight it plays host to Kelis – native New Yorker, uncommon siren and part-time chef.
Traditionally, summer is a boom time for greatest hits sets played by established artists in the grounds of great houses. It's not a time for edgy new ventures from emerging nextmen and women. (There is nothing intrinsically wrong with that: we have spring and autumn for edge.) But grandiose architecture can reconfigure even the most arresting music into mere entertainment. I remember seeing the xx here a few years back, and even they appeared denuded of their seductive otherworldliness by all the columns and cobbles and mobile cider vendors. Tonight, running a little late, Kelis plays a blinder, replete with hits, humour and flute solos. Her voluminous sea-goddess robes and cascades of hair say "timeless diva", while her gutsy husk, permanently congested, says "bags of personality".
But this latest incarnation of Kelis – she comes with a big band and a horn section, and percussionists playing samba rhythms, all strengths deployed to mesmerising effect on Food, her most recent album – repositions this innovative artist a little closer to the rich tradition of soul music, a comfort zone of sorts. Friday Fish Fry, a big, jaunty tune off the new album, owes much to old school rhythm and blues, jazzed up.
Other times, 1970s singer-songwriter soul adds to the feeling of cosiness, like when Kelis sings Lil Star sat on a stool. It's summery. It's feelgood – the set literally begins and ends with Kelis and the band doing bits of Nina Simone's Feeling Good – and it's probably just what people want on a balmy night in July. Was Trick Me – from 2004 – always this much of a brassy, jolly ska romp? Actually, it was always ska – but it was scrawnier, not so arranged. We don't get all Kelis's payload of hits tonight – her 1999 launchpad, Caught Out There, is absent, possibly due to its aggression – but the lifers here do get to sing along to Kelis's first claim to fame: her guest spot on Ol' Dirty Bastard's 1999 cut, Got Your Money. "Hey, Dirty, baby I got cha money," we coo. "Don't cha worry."
Kelis, an inveterate reinventioneer, more than deserves another lease of musical life with this resonant new record. She might move into a more lasting phase than the stopping and starting that have categorised her oeuvre, her genre and her hit rate. Not that long ago, sick of label politics, she was about to give up music for food, training as a cordon bleu saucier and making the move into mobile food vans and TV cookery. (She is having her gravy and eating it by doing both.) But you do mourn the eccentric, category-bucking R&B siren whose frequently peculiar records – the Neptunes-produced Milkshake was quite odd – always kept her followers' heads spinning a little. This is fun – a hits set by an established artist – but a little undemanding. How did Kelis get here?
Maybe it's just the overweening architecture. In a hot box back in the spring, the very same treatments sounded more radical, humid and revelatory. Outdoors, sound is notoriously capricious too. Tonight, gusts off the river and the natter of patrons whisk away a great deal of the stage banter. She's a sharp woman, Kelis, well endowed with perspective, and so it's a shame only the front few rows are getting all of her wisecracks. But late in the set we can all hear Kelis expounding on the nature of a good song. We all know one when we hear one, she posits. Even if you strip out the 4/4 beat from a good song, you still have a good song.
It's her way of introducing Acapella, a tribal rave hit from 2010. Tonight, it's anything but foursquare. The Latin flavours of the melody are amped up and its beats go over all frisky and polyrhythmic, like a World Cup highlights soundbed no one thought to use. As it is though, the balance of Rio carnival to grand tradition tilts too far towards safety tonight.
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