abesimpson22 said:
New Springsteen - much more lively than I expected. I thought it'd be a bunch of dirges. Instead, it sounds like what the music my second-grade music singer castrated should sound like. Or, as Rolling Stone said, what the E-Street band would have sounded like in 1912.
Still, Mellencamp's similar project was even better.
I didn't get around to posting anything about it last week, but I saw the Boss' new band's first live performance at Jazz Fest in NOLA. It was a tremendous show. That description by Rolling Stone is accurate. They rocked out folk music like I wouldn't have imagined. (Still, there were jackasses behind us yelling, "When you come back for the encore, leave the f---ing fiddles behind!" Dolts.) I think I counted 16 or so people on stage: four- or five-piece horn section, two fiddlers, banjo player, accordian player, three (or four?) guitarists, a guy who swapped between pedal steel and dobro (only electrified instrument), a pianist, three backup singers, drummer. I'm sure I left somebody out, but the group bow at the end of the set spanned the entire set. He kept prefacing songs with statements like, "This song was writting in 1912," and things like that. He did an Irish anti-war ballad from the 1810s that featured a line talking about a guy losing both his legs to a cannon ball that made you think of Iraq. I couldn't hear most of Springsteen's between-song banter, but much of it was political, obviously. He played long past the 7 p.m. mandatory stop time, an extra 30 minutes or so. He started his encore with My City's in Ruins, and if you didn't have a tear in your eye you were dead. It wasn't the first tear-jerking line of the set by any means (see, "Oh Mary Don't you Weep" and the lyric "God gave Noah the rainbow sign/'No more water but fire next time'/Pharaoh's army got drownded/O Mary don't you weep"; or any moment in "We Shall Overcome). In "Ruins," when he got to the "Rise Up" part, the audience without prompting threw their hands up, Gospel Tent-style. I'll never foget that show. Just wish they would have sold the live recording. Hopefully, he'll release it nationally as a fundraiser.
OK, enough sap. Other obscure acts I saw and recommend:
Jeremy Lyons and Deltabilly Boys and the
New Orleans Klezmer All-Stars. Neither will ever sniff the mainstream. One guy I heard for the first time and loved was
Eric Lindell. Fantastic blues guitarist who jammed the Fais Do Do Stage (my fave) on Friday.
Theresa Andersson was great Saturday. For the ladies, she sings great and plays a mean fiddle; for the guys, she sings great, plays a mean fiddle and is hot as heck. Anybody who wouldn't hit it is lying.
I'll spare you reviews of the New Leviathan Oriental Foxtrot Orchestra (but they were good, too)
