Largo is still a special place in the Los Angeles club jungle, people are polite and docile, they seat down in this intimate theater with its large red curtain, turn off their cell phones as they are told, and there is such a profound silence when musicians play, that you can hear the person sitting next to you actually breathing. Of course I find the no-photo policy exaggerated and from another era, but everything is set up for you to have the best musical experience, without that annoying 2012 technology,… as if we were back in time.
And talking about time, Jon Brion has been playing at Largo for ages! I am sure that the crowd on any Brion's Friday night consists of people who have been going to tons of his shows, as they are always different, and first-time goers, who have listened to all his movie soundtracks (‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’, I Heart Huckabees, ‘Boogie Nights’, ‘Magnolia’), know what a great producer he is, and want to check the man in person.
Last time I saw him, he was playing with Fiona Apple at the same location, but I had seen him a few years ago, during a solo set at Amoeba and at another location. At the time, he was looping several instruments and had amazingly played a one-man performance with 5 or 6 (or even more, I can’t remember) layered tracks. Even though his performance last Friday night was not like that, he showed the same effortless skill with any instrument, or any song requested by the public.
Jon Brion arrived on stage, looking a little bit like Jack White, tall and thin, wearing blue pants, a western shirt and a jacket, and his acoustic set could be seen as a guess-what-I-am-playing game for smart music aficionados. He started with a visit to 'The Wizard of Oz’, playing his own unique vocal-less jazzy-piano versions of ‘If I only Had a Brain’, and ‘Over the Rainbow’, then switched to one of his numerous guitars set up on stage for a quiet and pretty ‘Moon River’, with the vocals this time.
As the stage was packed with instruments, he was jokingly hesitating between his numerous guitars before playing a song, like a painter who could not choose the right brush for a particular work, then was spending some time tuning up, taking his time, and, at the same time, was joking with the audience about a mic falling down or about misheard lyrics.
The mood of the show was totally informal and relaxed, and he was alternating between standards, instrumentals, covers of famous songs and his own compositions like ‘Ruin My Day’, ‘Same Mistakes’, ‘Knock Yourself Out’, while sipping his coca-cola in a large glass.
He asked the audience for requests, and an avalanche of song titles were thrown at him. ‘Interesting batch’, he said at one point, ending up playing some kind of medley of his choice. ‘I Don’t know if it is a medley when there’re only two songs!’ he added. I recognized The Velvet Underground’s ‘Beginning to see the light’ or the Monkees’ ‘Whole Wide World’, but I am sure there were other tunes in the mix that escaped me,… as I said it is a guess-what-is-the-song game and you have to be fast and quite good to catch everything.
I was taking notes but there were a few songs I could not identify and which sounded quite lovely, one had the lyrics ‘I'm going to be fine/I'm further along’, and another one had these cute lines ‘there’s a little piece of you in all I do/there is a little piece of me in all you see’.
A great moment of the show was when he played the classic Lennon/McCartney ‘I’m only sleeping’ only using a very large xylophone, then Billie Holiday’s ‘Foolin’ Myself’ on guitar.
But Brion was that unpredictable human JukeBox, suddenly playing the few first notes of ‘Charlie’s Angels’ between songs, or giving the audience the occasion to sing along the 'Cheers Theme' song,… All night long he seemed to improvise with virtuosity and never ran out of ideas.
The evening could not be complete without guests, so Sara Watkins and brother Sean Watkins (from Nickel Creek) joined him with fiddler and guitar to play three folk-bluegrass songs (one was called ‘Too Much’), showcasing Sara Watkins’ very beautiful and delicate voice.
Brion also invited Liam Finn on stage (Liam is non other than the son of Crowded House’s Neil Finn), and the three songs they played together, ‘Cold Feet’, ‘Fire in your Belly’, and ‘Gather To The Chapel’ rapidly demonstrated that musical DNA cannot lie, at least in his case!
Then, Jon Brion came back for an encore to play his own song ‘Meaningless’ on harmonica and piano, which may be an unusual combination, but not for him; he actually began to tune up a guitar, then went to the piano, having changed his mind? As if we needed another proof that all this wasn't rehearsed at all.