Mexican
Radio – Wall of Voodoo
Heard
11/18/2015 around 6:00, at Jerry’s Subs (Fallsgrove)
Thursday, November 19, 2015
Madeleine Peyroux, The Barns at Wolf Trap, 11/17/2015
Row L, Seat
106 (further back than usual, but dead center)
Nice show!
Main level was pretty full (did have 3 empty seats next to me). Slightly
smaller combo on stage even than I had expected, just Madeleine, plus two other
wonderful musicians on guitar and upright bass, who also contributed harmony
vocals on a few songs. (Sort of thought they might have someone on keyboards.)
Started with
“Take These Chains From My Heart” (popularized by both Hank Williams and Ray
Charles) and “Between The Bars”. Several songs in, paid tribute to the late
Allen Toussaint with a politely funky version of “Everything I Do Gonna Be
Funky (From Now On)”, followed by a few songs with just Madeleine and her
acoustic guitar. Other highlights included “Don’t Cry Baby” and Randy Newman’s “Guilty”.
Really
kicked it into gear at the end, concluding with three tracks from her
breakthrough Careless Love album:
Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me To The End Of Love”, “Don’t Wait Too Long”, and the
title track. They then encored with the final cut from that CD, “This Is Heaven
To Me”. No intermission – whole show ran just under 90 minutes, meaning that I
actually made it home around 10:00.
Monday, November 16, 2015
The Brothers Four, Bethesda Blues & Jazz Club, 11/12/2015
1960s folk
legends the Brothers Four, still with one original member, had done a nice set
in an area church a few years back; this time they occupied the much larger
Bethesda Blues & Jazz Club for an enjoyable performance, with a two-hour show
divided into two sets. Most of the tables were filled, although the
theater-style seats in the rear were empty (as they don’t go on sale until the
table seats have sold out).
The group’s
trademark vocal harmonies worked well on such slow tunes as “Try To Remember”
and two of their best-known hits, “Green Leaves Of Summer” and “Greenfields”
(their next-to-last pre-encore number). The most enthusiastic crowd reactions,
however, seemed to come on the uptempo numbers where Mark Pearson pulled out
his banjo, such as their four-song “bluegrass medley”. Their two encores were a
stunning version of “Shenandoah” and finally “Michael Rowed The Boat Ashore” (a
personal favorite of mine from my childhood).
The previous
time I saw them, they did a great, sad song about the end of an old family farm
– I hadn’t heard it before, and they didn’t do any kind of introduction. Based
on the lyrics, I was finally able to chase it down (I thought) on the Internet:
“Time To Be Planting Again” by Leslie Eliel. They started into the song
Thursday night, but once they got into the chorus, I wondered about whether I
had found the correct song, despite the many similarities. Apparently Mark and
Leslie wrote the song together but decided to go in different directions with
the chorus, as the Brothers Four title their version “Heart Of The Heartland”.
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