Her cascading, switchback cadences tease out the syncopations of her remembrances into the most literary funk of the evening.After such polished, sophisticated fare, it was galling to see the Last Poets take to the stage plying the sort of pally shtick last heard in the mouths of yer man Wogan and Jimmy Tarbuck on Pro-Am Golf night. Though their traded raps and declamatory prickliness anticipated hip-hop’s “in ya face” attitude and posturing, the Poets’ stream of dogmatic paradoxes, which helped the black consciousness movement rhetorically to elbow its way to the centre of political debate in the Sixties, soon palled. Still, it’s a pity that we had so little time to savour Lemn Sissay’s wry, incisive observations. Wondering when students will “stop asking me about ‘the issue of race in modern Britain’,” Sissay’s hyperactive presence and perky delivery belie his ability to get under the skin of white liberal fears: “I’ll either make you laugh or feel guilty.” Yet it’s hard not to warm to a poet so alert to poetry’s racial platitudes: “Don’t worry, I won’t be rhyming ‘Coltrane’ with ‘pain’ at any point tonight.”
Over the past few years, Dana Bryant has been contributing what she dubs “spoken-word music” to the work of various soul, rap and jazz luminaries, bringing her rich storytelling talent to bear on the otherwise leaden platitudes of Gangstarr’s Guru and the breezy jazz guitar noodlings of Ronnie Jordan.Easing herself before the mic, Bryant’s languid presence recalls nothing so much as one of her own characters: “He was drawn into a gesture the way someone is drawn into a yawn.” She may have been the least overtly political poet on stage, but she evokes a pungent sense of identity, spinning out memories of loves and incidents of her Brooklyn childhood. Without either of these twin pillars of contemporary black music, no Public Enemy, no Ice Cube, not much dance music and (perhaps less inconceivable, this one) no Normski.

Regularly namechecked by any rap crew worth its Spike Lee video, the Last Poets were indeed seminal in marrying a militant black consciousness to drums whose angry rhythms still echo today. Encouraging their mainstream counterparts Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye to wake up to their black heritage, they were vital in introducing the issue of race into the woodpile of popular music Without the Last Poets, no hip-hop or rap. “Gigagain” included some of the most entertaining music theatre I’ve seen in years.Meltdown continues at the Royal Festival Hall, London SE1 to 5 July (0171- 960 4242). There was a hilarious Cable Street Blues by Mike Westbrook where the septet reacted – physically as well as musically – to the suggestive flickerings on an imagined film screen; and then, a little later, John Tavener held us captive with his mystically distended Petra.

It was miracle enough that the Gogmagogs could play their instruments from contorted positions, but that their movements, gestures, facial expressions, group timing and, most crucially, musical skills were so expertly balanced – all, plus much, much more – marked them as exceptional artists. Jane Gardner’s The Wildlife trilogy featured illuminated bows imitating tropical fish, extraordinary “monsters” with instruments as heads and a ghostly “Night Choir”. Lucy Bailey directed seven young string players in a dozen or so brilliant “music and movement” sketches, starting in darkness with performers and instruments heaped on the floor, then gradually “Getting Up” (Said Murad’s title) for joyful “Greetings” (also by Murad). A Dummy Duet had Laurie Anderson working a mini “dummy fiddler” on one side of the stage, while a horribly macabre larger dummy – operated by two figures veiled in black – played on the other.

The concert closed with Pete Cooper, Roger Wilson and Joe Townsend, joined by the “Celtic grunge” Ashley MacIsaac, stamping the boards for a Highland fling.
Pitting Anderson’s curious tales against “the Gogmagogs Gigagain” at the Bridewell Theatre the following night – presented as part of the City of London Festival – contrasted what seemed like works in progress with genuine finished artistry. Well, there was Anderson’s “Tape Bow Quartet”, where four ladies each drew a length of recorded tape (in place of bow hair) across a tape-head (in place of strings). Fragments of speech spat and spluttered while the quartet swayed this way or that. Then there was The Sea (for John Cage), where Simon Wills conducted a fragment of the second violin line from the first movement of Debussy’s La Mer, measuring the missing bars in his head and conducting them as meaningful silences. Pelecis’s piece was immense fun (lots of jokey tuba and contra-bassoon writing), though less memorable than a dazzling, unscheduled and unaccompanied Tango-Etude by Astor Piazzolla.

Back on schedule, BK Chandrashekar treated us to some curvaceous south Indian Karnatic music, fiddling away while stage-hands shifted chairs and the young members of the Indian Strings Chamber Orchestra prepared to join in. RN Prakesh slapped his claypot, we tapped our feet, and the 100 violins entered the spirit under Chandrashekar’s hand-clapping direction. Joe Townsend’s A Cat, a Horse and a Tree had the orchestra sound like a Romanian gypsy band and the grisly “Readings from the Encyclopaedia of the Violin, 1921″ – intoned by Nordine and Anderson herself – included lots about dried-out intestines

Could things get any stranger, I thought. Aurelie Dupont, whom I saw (she is one of three casts), does it magnificently, but the whole ensemble is terrific, as is the resident orchestra under Olaf Henzold’s conducting.. The first weekend of Laurie Anderson’s Meltdown Festival at the South Bank climaxed on Sunday afternoon in the Queen Elizabeth Hall with 100 violinists turning on the heat. Everything had its story, and there were no predictable endings. Writer and broadcaster Ken Nordine told us about Rog (Oh, Here’s Rog) who “played the organ in church.. a strange guy, stranger than strange”.