web analytics

Pop Rock Nation

Tag: concert reviews

  • Diana Krall, live in Stuttgart…

    Diana Krall, live in Stuttgart…

    wallflower

    My husband and I were lucky enough to score last minute tickets to see Diana Krall in Stuttgart, Germany…

    It happened over last weekend. A friend of mine who shares my love of beer sent me a private message on Facebook. He wanted to know if my husband Bill and I wanted to see Diana Krall. He followed up by telling me who she is– which I thought was pretty funny because I’ve been listening to Diana Krall for years. I didn’t know she was coming to Stuttgart, though. My friend said he’d really wanted to go to the show. It was a birthday present to himself. But he’s about to leave Germany and the movers were coming to start packing up his house, so he and his wife couldn’t go.

    I’ll be honest. As much as I love music and enjoy hearing it live, I haven’t been to very many concerts. I am not one who enjoys big crowds, traffic jams, or trying to find a parking place. But Bill and I were due for a date night and it had been years since our last concert. In fact, I think the last one we saw was also in Stuttgart, Germany back in March 2009. Lyle Lovett played a great show at the Liederhalle and I remember thinking how nice the venue is and what great seats we had.

    I asked Bill what he thought about seeing Diana Krall in the middle of a work week and I gave him my friend’s deeply discounted ticket price, especially for the awesome seats we had. He gave me a slow yes. We bought the tickets and saw the show, which was to support her latest, rather pop oriented album, Wallflower.

    Bill and I found our seats near the aisle on row eight. My friend had chosen good ones; we had a seat on either one of us free and I had pretty much an unobstructed view of the stage. I could see Diana at her piano, looking slighter than I imagined her to be. She had a fantastic band, the names of whom she mentioned several times. While everyone in the band played effortlessly, the two standout musicians last night besides Krall herself were Anthony Wilson on guitar and the legendary Stuart Duncan on fiddle. Being a bluegrass fan, I had heard of Duncan and enjoyed his playing many times on many albums. I think it may have been my first exposure to Wilson, but it definitely won’t be my last. Upright bass player Dennis Crouch stood by Krall, stoically and expertly playing his large violin and providing structure and texture to the performance. I also enjoyed the drummer and organ players, but their names escape me at the moment. I think it may be because Wilson and Duncan were coming so close to stealing the show!

    The first thing I noticed about Krall’s set list was that she only played a few songs from her latest album; much of the approximately two hour show was devoted to her older, jazzier material. I liked that and so did the many Germans in attendance with us. Accompanied by an interesting and artistic computerized light show, Krall and her band played a whole lot of songs by Nat King Cole, interspersed with more recent hits. I think the standout number last night was “Temptation”, a song by Tom Waits which suits Krall’s smokey vocals and gave her excellent band the chance to show off their skills. Wilson practically looked like he was making love to his guitar, complete with ecstatic facial expressions. Duncan made sounds come from the fiddle that I’ve never heard before… and I loved it! And Krall’s fingers danced nimbly across her keyboards, enthralling the audience as she easily moved from an electronic keyboard to a grand piano. I enjoy Diana Krall’s singing, but I think I love her piano playing much more. She is a very gifted pianist.

    About an hour into the two hour show, Krall’s band departed. She asked the audience not to worry; they weren’t going far. She said they needed beer. I can relate and they’re in a good place to get it. Krall then played several songs alone, including “S’Wonderful”, which is the very first song I ever heard her sing, and “Frim Fram Sauce”. I thought maybe we’d get an intermission, but she kept right on playing, chatting with the audience and telling us about her world tour. She said her eight year old twin boys had a chance to join her for “a little bit”. I couldn’t help but wonder how hard it must be for musicians to leave their families when they tour… but then, as the wife of a retired Army officer, maybe I have more of an idea than many do. She sang “A Case of You”, explaining that she’d had the chance to try some of the local wine, which she really enjoyed. And she played her haunting rendition of “California Dreaming” and Bob Dylan’s “Wallflower”.

    At the end of the show, the Germans were on their feet, demanding an encore. Krall and her band obliged, and included a mesmerizing rendition of “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”. The music was enchanting, but what really got my attention was the visual display, which showed a couple from the 30s dancing. Bill said he thought it might be Marlene Dietrich and I wish I were cultured enough to confirm his suspicions. But watching the dancing couple from the past while listening to Krall and her band play live was breathtaking and I could hear that the audience was as amazed as I was. A baby cried and Diana spontaneously broke into a lovely rendition of “Brahm’s Lullaby”, during which Duncan joined her on fiddle. That made the audience laugh. The child stopped crying, but started again once Krall moved on to the next number. Krall said, “I got lots more where that came from.” eliciting more laughter from the crowd.

    Naturally, there was a standing ovation and Bill and I left the concert hall feeling wonderful. I had to send a note to my local friend, thanking him for letting us buy the tickets. Hopefully, he’ll have the chance to see her in his next duty station in Washington State. As for me, I think I’ve become more of a Diana Krall fan now. Diana Krall’s world tour continues tonight in Frankfurt, Germany. She’ll be in North America next month.

  • The Band Played… “Poptones.” The Continuing Adventures of Public Image Limited in the American Midwest

    I’ve been waiting literally 20 years to see the band Public Image Ltd, the jagged-post-punk-dub-arty-dance-pop-with-something-to-say juggernaut led by former Sex Pistol John Lydon. The last time the band played Milwaukee was in the fall of ’89. They were touring behind their album 9 at the time, and had a near brush with the U.S. pop charts with the song “Disappointed”, which, if I were to rank my personal favorite singles of all time, would probably fall somewhere in or near the top 10. (Along with their signature classic from 1986 “Rise”.)

    After their next album together (1992’s That What Is Not), PiL sort of disappeared for awhile. Aside from a John Lydon solo album, there have been no new records from the band. But while there still isn’t a new album from the group, it would be incorrect to say that there has been no new music. Lydon has reconvened the band for its first U.S. tour since 1992. Last night, I saw them play at the Pabst Theater in Milwaukee and it must be said that even though their set list leaned heavily on songs from the group’s 1979 album Metal Box (or Second Edition) – generally, and rightly, considered the group’s masterpiece, and truly a pivotal album of its era – the music felt very new, and the performances very now. Listening to the band re-animating their back catalog, I was again struck by how rhythmically, atmospherically, and emotionally complex these songs are, and how well they rebuked the joker a few rows behind me who shouted “Pretty Vacant!” (and laughed at his own stupid joke) as the band took the stage.

    Not only have songs like “Poptones” and the freaking glorious “Albatross” remained relevant, they’ve actually become more so over time, and when the band closed its set with an increasingly bass-heavy (at Johnny’s chanted urging) take on the song “Religion”, prefaced with a pop quiz (“These are not trick questions!”) on the Pope, the Catholic church, and justice (Milwaukee is one of the epicenters of the current pedophile priest scandals), the outrage and the rebellion were absolutely palpable. (And not just because the ridiculously/wonderfully amplified bass was rumbling our Pabst Blue Ribbon filled bellies.) If there had been a picture of the pope in the room, the bass alone would have vaporized it.

    It’s true the band is comprised entirely of graying and/or paunchy fifty-somethings – PiL veterans Lu Edmonds and Bruce Smith, along with bassist-extraordinaire Scott Firth (whose resume includes work with both Elvis Costello and the Spice Girls). It’s also true that they played a slew of obvious fan favorites, like the opener “This Is Not a Love Song”. But let’s make at least this much clear: This is not an oldies act. This is not a greatest hits show. It’s a 2010 show by a 2010 band with 2010 things to say; and though this is a band that spoke to the high school social outcast 1989 Paul Lorentz, this is a band that kicked the ass of the mortgage-paying-cube-dwelling-slightly-more-socially-appealing-father-of-two 2010 Paul Lorentz.

    A quick note about the audience. The apparent median age of the pit audience was 47 and a half. The average weight I’m guessing was about 245. There were more chins than scalps with hair. It was, without exaggeration, the oldest, fattest, baldest pit I’d ever seen. In fact, it was an audience I felt young in, which is an increasingly rare phenomenon, and this gave the proceedings another (however accidental) layer of subversion. The truest punks and rebels of the Milwaukee metro area now look like (and are) grandparents. I myself had a bit of a curmudgeonly moment during the band’s entrancing, alternately meditative and cathartic performance of “U.S.L.S. 1” when an overly flirtatious douchebag and the Taylor Swift lookalike he was trying to make (the only twentysomethings in the audience?) wouldn’t shut up, and I asked them to take it to the lobby. They didn’t immediately comply, but they were clearly not there to see a band play a show (or maybe they were there to see Maroon 5 – oops, easy mistake), and were not long for the place.

    After Lydon firmly admonished those in the pit to keep their beers and their bodies off the stage, Lydon affirmed that Public Image Ltd was at the Pabst Theater to enjoy themselves, and they proceeded to do just that for a couple of hours. Throughout the show, Lydon was equal parts den-mother, coach, guidance counselor, rebel warrior, nation-builder, and incendiary device, and he took on each of these roles with an uncompromised joy and unflinching conviction. Reputation for confrontation notwithstanding, Lydon proved a most gracious frontman for an audience that was often either overly polite or (especially later in the show) just plain pooped.

    One of my favorite moments in the show was the band’s take on the 1989 single “Warrior” , in which all of those roles came together in a single song. The chorus of the song says “I’m a warrior. This is my land.” In concert last night, Lydon virtually declared the audience and the band together a new nation-state; but he also touchingly proclaimed the U.S. his adopted country (he’s becoming a citizen), repeatedly mentioned how nice it was to see smiling faces in the audience (and by extension the U.S.), and rejected self-pity and complacence. At the end of the song, he asked “Are you a warrior?” The audience replied with the predictable noises. Lydon chuckled in response (I’m paraphrasing), “Well, yes, kind of relaxed warriors.” It was more sweet than judgmental, but it was clearly both. It was good to see his smiling face too. I hope to see it again soon.

  • David Byrne Rocks Brooklyn

    byrne

    Last night’s Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival opened with the groovy and unrelenting music of New Wave icon David Byrne. Byrne played a nearly-2 hour set of his material borne out of collaborations with Brian Eno, drawing from three Talking Heads albums and the albums My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and last year’s Everything that Happens will Happen Today. Byrne was on-form and his band drove the set with powerful, in-the-pocket grooves that brought the audience back to those halcyon days when the Talking Heads were a critically-acclaimed and popular band (even if some of the audience members, this one included, did not live those days). Fans dug versions of “Once in a Lifetime” and “Life During Wartime”, which were true to the original and featured, like many of the other songs, whacky antics from Byrne and his supporting cast, a mix of musicians and dances all clad in white.
    This stop in Brooklyn was part of a larger “Songs of David Byrne and Brian Eno” tour that has been going on since the fall of 2008 and will continue across the US and overseas to Europe for the summer. Celebrate Brooklyn is in it’s thirtieth year and is more popular than ever – this concert featured the largest crowd in the festival’s history. Celebrate Brooklyn is rocking an awesome line up – artists diverse as John Scofield, Big Daddy Kane, Femi Kuti, Dr. Dog, MGMT and Animal Collective (the last two are benefit concerts and, therefore, not free) will grace the Prospect Park Bandshell – and ya’ll should definitely get down there to enjoy the festivities. The only piece of advice that I can share is that it is essential to get there early. Once the crowd reaches overcapacity, the gates are shut and people left out have to watch from afar, which is still neat, but not quite the same.