After a long live music drought, I found myself thrown by happy circumstance into no less than five shows last week. It only felt right to share.
Getting out of your comfort zone is essential to shake the dust off of your eardrums, and catching Shemekia Copeland and the Robert Cray Band at their August 10 ZooTunes gig did just that for me. Bluntly put, most modern blues leaves me cold: Too often, the cut-to-the-bone honesty and sweatiness of real blues gets sacrificed to cozy ducks’-ass slickness by modern players. But Copeland and Cray eased my resistance some.
The blues literally runs in Copeland’s blood. Her daddy was the late, legendary Texas blues guitarist Johnny Copeland, and she’s blessed with one powerhouse of a voice, a room-filling and rich instrument that can steamroll a riff with the best of ‘em. Live, her thundering delivery helped dirty up the glossiness of some of her new material, and when the song quality intersected with her singing (as on the smoldering anti-abuse cut, “Ain’t Gonna Be Your Tattoo”), the already-warm Sunday afternoon got ten degrees hotter.
Robert Cray, Sunday’s headliner, became the poster boy for modern blues when he first broke out 25-plus years ago. A spiritual kin to Stevie Ray Vaughan, Cray likewise infuses his blues playing with rock shadings, and he’s a magpie of a songwriter, cherry-picking elements of reggae, ska, and arena rock for his original tunes. That broad range sometimes renders his material homogenous, but Cray’s astonishing playing invigorated every song in his 90-minute set: Each solo he fired off was so hook-laden, he was practically building songs within songs with each lick.
Two days later, England’s Arctic Monkeys played the second of two sold-out shows at the Paramount. Amazingly, almost a decade has passed since the band reinvented the British guitar rock wheel with a speedball of Buzzcocks-tight riffs and wry lyrics, and in the interim they’ve honed their already-assured live shows to near-lethal efficacy. Alex Turner played the Rock Star to the hilt last Tuesday, prowling the stage and combing his well-tended pompadour like some whippet-thin British Elvis. Best of all, his theatrics never detracted from his evocative croon. The rest of the band backed him like champs, and the songs off their latest album, AM, flowered into glittering (literally, given the impressive light show) live arena-disco-glam anthems that sent the mostly all-ages crowd into a surging frenzy.
The scale got way smaller—but no less sweaty—Wednesday night, when smut-soul legend/proto-rapper Blowfly turned Barboza into Ground Zero for one ass-kicking house party. DIY before the writers who invented the term were probably even born, Blowfly’s potty-mouthed parodies of classic soul songs provided the raunchy touchstone from which gangsta rap was born, and last week he barked out those tunes in a voice so ragged it coulda taken the varnish off every piece of furniture in the room. Blowfly’s backing bands have been hit or miss over the years, but the players shoring up his superhero-suited antics kept things tight and funky last Wednesday. Major bonus points were provided in the form of two local acts: NighTrain drummer Taryn Dorsey fronted her other terrific band WISCON like a member of the Ronettes being backed by Devo, while The Gods Themselves’ awesome middle set wedded post-punk tautness with some funk snap and lead singer Astra Elaine’s wah-wah pedal sorcery.
In case you’re keeping score, this website is pretty much over the moon for the baroque pop stylings of Seattle’s own Tomten, and their record release show at the Crocodile last Thursday confirmed that they’re more than capable of bringing the dreamy magic of their recordings to a live venue, thanks very much. Bolstered by second guitarist Robert Bennett and a three-man horn section for several tunes, Brian Noyeswatkins and company added just enough live fire to the textured beauty of their tunes to satisfy in a big way during their set, and they executed my favorite encore of the week with a lovably ragged cover of The Velvet Underground’s “There She Goes Again” and an anthemic take on their original, “Jujube”. I missed middle-slotters Add Ode, but the other opening acts, Spring (a Canadian psych-pop band that sounds like a winning cross between Love and Modest Mouse) and Heatwarmer (a local quintet that married Death Cab indie pop with prog-rock complexity), delivered sharp opening turns.
Friday night saw me ending the music week the way I began it—namely, with some blues. At first blush, Texas-born singer/piano player Marcia Ball cut an incongruous figure during her first Jazz Alley set Friday night (her tasteful dress and short-coiffed hair made her look more like a university professor at a party than a blues belter), but she delivered her set of original jazz-informed blues tunes with unforced grace. Backed by award-winning slide guitarist Cindy Cashdollar and an ace ensemble, the performance felt like a real group effort, almost to a fault (Ball plays a mean set of ivories, but didn’t really break out her own fireworks ‘til the closing number). But that’s just quibbling. As was, she and her band got a sizable corner of Jazz Alley dancing, and that easy Texas-cum-New-Orleans swing took a lot of the financial sting out of my $25 plate of ravioli.
