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He’s
the Man
By
Kirsten Ferguson
Joe
Jackson, Thea Gilmore
Troy
Savings Bank Music Hall, Oct. 30
‘I
have a chronic inability to write a completely happy song
or a completely sad song,” Joe Jackson said during his Troy
Savings Bank Music Hall show last Thursday, telling the packed
audience the story behind “Solo (So Low),” a woeful new song
from his latest album Rain that paints a somber portrait
of a blue period during the songwriter’s life. “It’s sort
of a wrist-slasher,” he joked, but one lessened by the sentiment
that when things get bad, the “way to deal with it is to stop
taking yourself so seriously.”
During his well-received concert in the frescoed music hall,
Jackson appeared to take his own advice: Although the performance,
often quite gratifying, wasn’t always perfect, he shook off
any minor missteps in good-humored fashion. “We started with
the slowest song we know and we’re going to gradually speed
up” to compensate for acoustic challenges in the space, he
explained, after set-opener “Not Here, Not Now,” a bittersweet
breakup ballad from 1984’s Body and Soul. Jackson followed
with a reworked version of his dubbed-out classic, “Fools
in Love,” contorting his face and laughing when he blanked
out on a portion of the 30-year-old lyrics.
The British songwriter—a legend, to employ the overused term—first
walked onto the stage in a dapper beige suit, looking unexpectedly
tall, and gave an understated little bow before taking a seat
behind the piano, where he remained for the rest of the evening,
occasionally pausing to sip from a cup of herbal tea. Bassist
Graham Maby and drummer Dave Houghton, longtime bandmates
of Jackson’s going back to the 1970s, accompanied him, with
Houghton’s kit shielded behind a Plexiglas screen to blunt
the reverb.
Given the pianocentric, guitarless lineup, and Jackson’s concerns
about muddling the sound by rocking at full force, the set
favored the smooth soul-jazz of Jackson’s more stylized pop
tunes: “Chinatown,” from his chart-topping 1982 album Night
and Day, percolated with a dramatic tribal groove; the
trio managed to out-lounge Becker and Fagen (that’s not easy
to do) on a Latinized cover of Steely Dan’s “Reeling in the
Years”; and the hit “Steppin’ Out” meandered a bit but still
resonated with its unforgettable melody and pulsating bass
line.
Throughout, you could tell the angry rocker from Jackson’s
new-wave past was itching to make an appearance. It did when
the trio upped the tempo for “On Your Radio,” Jackson pounding
extra hard on the keys, and on the frantic bust-up lament
“One More Time,” which found Maby and Houghton chiming in
with impassioned backup vocals. “Citizen Sane,” one of a handful
of newer tunes deployed from Rain, fit right in with
acerbic rockers of yore; at the close of the seething pop
song, Jackson titled his head back and yelped a satisfied
“yeah.”
The crowd favorite “Is She Really Going Out with Him”—with
audience members relishing their role of shouting “where”
for every one of Jackson’s “see over there”—and a slightly
sappish “A Slow Song” closed out the show; before he left
the stage, Jackson paused for a moment, looked out on the
crowd and smiled, as if to let the applause fully sink in.
“I
wrote this song in solidarity with Joan,” explained Thea Gilmore,
a promising young British singer-songwriter who opened the
show. In 2004, Gilmore accompanied folk singer Joan Baez on
the road across the United States at presidential election
time. “As you can imagine, she was not very happy,” Gilmore
quipped, before leading the crowd in a rousing sing-along
to her own forceful protest song, “Are You Ready?”
American
Classics
Tim O’Brien
The
Linda, Oct. 31
The
chorus of old-time fiddle chestnut “Cotton-Eyed Joe” runs,
“Where did you come from/Where did you go/Where did you come
from/Cotton Eyed Joe.” But when Grammy-winning bluegrass singer
and multi-instrumentalist extraordinaire Tim O’Brien, who
performed last Friday at a full WAMC Performing Arts Studio,
sang “World of Trouble,” his self-penned song about the politically
manufactured climate of fear in America, he quoted the line
and drew laughter with the hilarious twist of substituting
Osama Bin Laden for Cotton-Eyed Joe. Sure, those who fastidiously
preserve folk-music traditions are to be respected, but performers
like O’Brien who can update them, and with consummate musicianship
to boot, must be cheered on.
It being Halloween, O’Brien emerged from the stage door looking
simply divine in a woman’s red-haired, pageboy-cut wig and
carrying an acoustic guitar. Already onstage were a five-string
banjo, a fiddle, and an archtop bouzouki, all of which he
would play flawlessly.
The 54-year-old Nashville native and Hot Rize alumnus opened
with Roger Miller’s snappy country classic “Kansas City Star,”
a ditty about a TV cowboy who doesn’t want to leave his local
market for the better gig he has on offer. O’Brien’s resonant
tenor vocals were in top form, and for his solo break he deftly
flatpicked a lead line in the bass interspersed with treble
chords reminiscent of the Carter Scratch technique. From there
he played a traditional Irish song of seafaring from his Hot
Rize days, “Colleen Malone,” his clear voice hitting the throat-busting
high notes with ease.
To mark the holiday, a pair of ghost songs followed: “Restless
Spirit Wandering” was about the ghost of a fallen young Confederate
soldier whom O’Brien claims haunts his former Nashville home.
The audience was then invited to join in on a slow, elegiac
rendition of Lefty Frizzell’s “Long Black Veil.”
O’Brien later played fiddle on a propulsive medley of Southern
Appalachian reels—“Sandy River Belle,” “The Kitchen Girls,”
and “My Love Is in America”—and expertly frailed the banjo
on, among other things, a version of Lonnie Johnson’s blues
tune “Little Rocking Chair.”
It’s worth noting that several of the area’s best acoustic
pickers turned out for the show. If Tim O’Brien is a performer
who can wow the connoisseurs, the rank-and-file listeners
must have been overwhelmed. I was left a critic with nothing
to criticize, which was fine with me.
—Glenn Weiser
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| Photo:
Julia Zave |
Toot
Your Own Horn
Hip-hop,
R&B, and rock & roll collided at the Washington Avenue
Armory on Saturday. Long-running Philadelphia band the Roots,
led by rapper Black Thought (pictured, without tuba), and
second-wave rap-rock act Gym Class Heroes, are
currently co-headlining a tour which brought them to Albany
last weekend. Up-and-coming British singer Estelle
opened the show; she’s currently riding the international
success of the single “American Boy,” though we’re told the
song’s guest MC—Kanye West—was not in the house on this night.
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