Richie Havens’s hippie minstrel show; Jess Klein’s arrival
(LENOX, Mass., October 1, 2000) Nostalgia was the operative dynamic of the
evening at Ozawa Hall on Saturday night, as Richie Havens and Aztec Two-Step
took listeners back a quarter-century or more to a time at once more
innocent and, perhaps, more vital.
Havens, the iconic folk-hippie, may have aged some, but time has only
ripened him. Bedecked in his purple floor-length tunic, with a flowing gray
beard and hint of a pony tail, he had the presence of a folk-Buddha or sage,
albeit one with a quirky, whispery wit. He seemed to be in on a
not-so-secret secret, one he happily shared with his audience, who got the
joke, which was that at a Richie Havens concert, it’s always 1969, and
freedom’s just another word for the last song on his set list.
Havens always was and still is unique. He’s a self-made folksinger, one who
invented his own style of performance which hasn’t varied in over 30 years.
Now as then, he takes popular and obscure folk and pop songs and runs them
through the Richie Havens blender, and out comes Bob Dylan and Beatles songs
that bear little to no resemblance to their original versions.
Instead they’re delivered as impassioned tirades over rapidly strummed,
open-tuned modal chords. Stripped of melody and rhythm, the songs lose their
native impact, instead serving as raw material for Haven’s torrential
outpourings of raw emotion, courtesy of his resonant, gluey baritone, as
much the instrument as his guitar.
Havens peppered his hour-long program with tales, some evocative, some
simply bizarre, from the lifelong tour he said he’s been on since ’67. Fans
greeted stories about Greenwich Village coffeehouses and phrases like “blows
my mind,” “hip” and “far out” like parched wanderers in a desert suddenly
stumbling upon an oasis. A lengthy digression about an unnamed guitarist who
spouted cryptic koans on Muscle Beach left listeners scratching their heads,
however, much like the unfortunate musclehead who eventually was revealed as
the butt of the joke.
Ultimately, Havens is simply a category to himself, and if his stylized
renditions made everything he played sound like the same song, it didn’t
much matter to the audience; they happen to like that song just fine.
They liked Aztec Two-Step too, even though the duo’s particular style of
1970’s pop-folk doesn’t hold up as well as that of Havens. This is partly
because there’s nothing particularly original about it; Rex Fowler and Neal
Shulman play a sincere, gentle, wistful but ultimately unsophisticated style
of pop-influenced folk-rock that smooths over folk’s rough edges and avoids
rock’s dissonances.
What’s left is unconvincing, as in a song that implores its listeners to
dance while offering them no reason to do so, or as in their cult favorite,
“The Persecution and Restoration of Dean Moriarty (On the Road),” whose
cliché image of Jack Kerouac as an outsider is the musical equivalent of
those Gap ads that use the writer’s image to sell khakis.
The revelation of the evening was opener Jess Klein. In her all-too-brief
set, the singer-songwriter displayed immense promise to go along with her
overwhelming talent. Klein combined the naked expressiveness of Emmylou
Harris, the rootsy sensuality of Lucinda Williams and the sheer tonal beauty
of Joan Baez in a voice all her own.
The half-dozen, well-crafted songs she played showed an astonishing range of
mood and narrative style; “The Cloud Song” was a poem she wrote for her
mother; “Ireland” was a fierce message to a lover running away from problems
at home; “I’ll Be Alright” was an imaginary letter from a female millworker
uprooted from her family farm.
The dimunitive Klein boasts enormous vocal range and power. She isn’t always
fleet with her guitar, and she lacked the commanding focus and presence of
her much more experienced colleagues on the evening’s bill. Given time,
however, there’s seemingly little to get in her way of being the main
attraction.
Seth Rogovoy rogovoy@berkshire.net music news, interviews, reviews, et al.
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