Bob Dylan
Otis Redding
Al Green
Bruce Cockburn
These are artists Frazey Ford covered in her hour plus set last night.
Cockburn is a nod to her home town, but the others? What is the former Be Good Tanyas thinking of for her grand return after motherhood and suburbia? Well?
A flawed but fascinating set, featuring fine covers and some really good originals, the oddly voiced folkie reunited with her soul past last night as well.
But first, her opening act Daniel Wayne -a Cincinatti native.
Wayne is a singer-songwriter cum bluesman with a lotta buzz on the ground but I found him a touch bland. He splits his songs down the middle and when he is in singer-songwriter mode, he can write a song, and when he is in blues mode he is very obvious. And throughout the set, he switches from one to the other and it kinda stops the momentum.Lyrically, he is the king of self-flagellation -always a buzz in my book. Both Wayne and the guy he was playing with are mean guitarist and his voice is a unique rattle, he is playing Mercury Lounge with a full band in September and it could make the difference.
Frazy has a full band, the Quiet Revolution, and after Frazy looking pretty in pink, comes out alone for the opening song and immediately holds on to the proscenium and she doesn’t let go, the band joins her. The set, with second guitarist, drummer, bassist, is all sustained momentum till a misjudged second encore. The sound a hybrid soul folk , all mid-tempo folk rocky with an r&b streak in her voice which reminds of a Joplin a little when she wails -which she doesn’t very often.
The self-control is amazing, and highly distilled in sound, and though Frazy hasn’t played in years (“busy raising my child” and “gossipping”), she is at ease enough with the band to appear both relaxed and coiled.
Frazy is satisfying in her lack of pretentiousness, she lets her music do the hard work while she treats the audience with a friendly off handedness.
And the problem isn’t that the set is not well put together. She rolls with it from the get go.
But, introducing a cover with “Dylan was a God in our household, but I grew out of it” beat “somewhat”, she gets all of “One More Cup Of Coffee” -about as lame a choice as imaginable. Throws me out of the concert a little. All those first songs are quiet, slowish, moody, lovely but distracted. Everything is depended upon the quality of the material.
So while I was having my doubts the very next song after theDylan, the guitarist Trish picks up a banjo and , Frazey and the band get all over “Firecracker” -an absolute gem from her first and current solo album Obediah. And she follows that with a great cover of Otis Redding’s “Happy Song” and that with “Gospel Song” and then possibly the finest moment all night “If You Gonna Go” replete with a shining harmonica solo.
The encore was three songs long (two encores: cmon kid) and if it had been one song it woulda been perfect. Frazy’s sterling version of Al Green’s perennial classic “Let’s Stay Together” -a song you think there might be nothing to add to but there is and Frazy’s soul yet almost anti-soul voice, caresses the song as she slows it down and savors it before knocking it out the park at the end.
It is the only moment in the night when Frazy gives herself completely to the moment, when she risks herself.
And if the set ended there my claim would be, very good concert and I wouldn’t mind catching her again after a coupla months on the road.
So I’ll ignore the Cockburn song and stop here.