 |
|
Swingin’
for Christmas: Monheit at the Egg.
|
Just
Enough Christmas
By
Shawn Stone
Jane Monheit
The
Egg, Dec. 2
Singer Jane Monheit and her five-piece band held sway over
a cozy crowd at the Egg’s Swyer Theater on Saturday evening.
It was advertised as a holiday show, and the selections balanced
jazz standards, Christmas tunes and a generous helping of
Brazilian music by Antonio Carlos Jobim. (Monheit and company
have a mostly Brazilian album coming out early next year.)
While Monheit has been, over the years, uneven in the studio,
she’s effective and thoroughly convincing live. She can scat,
but didn’t overdo it—her skill was matched by her taste and
restraint.
She opened with “September in the Rain,” a charming ’30s song
usually associated with Al Jolson. Monheit crossed up the
regret in the lyrics with playful line readings; that sort
of thing usually bugs me, but not this time. Pianist Mike
Kanan, who was the band’s chief musical wit, switched from
the baby grand to electric piano for the next two numbers,
the Carpenters holiday ditty “Merry Christmas Darling” and
the first of the Jobim tunes.
The Carpenters tune made for a nice few minutes of swing,
but I’m not sure if Monheit and company’s approach to the
Brazilian sound works. On this—and on the other few numbers
from the upcoming disc—the approach was just too hard. They
didn’t, for lack of a better word, bring any sway to
this sensual, textured genre.
The American pop songs were uniformly excellent, however.
Monheit teased out every playful Dorothy Fields lyric in “I
Won’t Dance.” The band showed off their cohesion on a hard-swinging
“Cheek to Cheek,” even though drummer Rick Montalbano wasn’t
thrilled to play it again. (That’s what Monheit told the audience,
anyway.)
And the Christmas material? Very nice. Monheit clearly loves
to sing holiday music, and thoroughly enjoyed the plaintive
“What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve”; the warm, inviting Sinatra
standard “The Christmas Waltz”; the perennial kids fave “Santa
Claus Is Coming to Town”; and a surprisingly moving “Have
Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” It probably helped that
she sang the original lyrics, with their melancholy hint of
absence and possible loss: “Until then, we’ll have to muddle
through somehow.”
The show was about 75 minutes, plus an encore and without
either opening act or intermission. If it seems too short,
it wasn’t. Monheit and band gave the crowd everything they
came for.
Hot
Shit
Hot Tuna
The
Egg, Dec. 3
No, you can’t call yourselves “Hot Shit,” the humorless suits
at RCA Records told Jefferson Airplane members Jorma Kaukonen
and Jack Casady in 1970 when they negotiated with the label
to record their spinoff project, a country-blues acoustic
duo featuring Kaukonen’s fancy fingerstyle guitar picking
over Casady’s acid-rock electric bass. Their working moniker,
Jorma and Jack, wouldn’t do for an album, and with the execs
nixing the scatological sobriquet, they settled on “Hot Tuna,”
explained variously as slang for either a fresh heroin high
(the opposite of cold turkey), or pussy. Fortunately, the
Neanderthal band names were not predictive of their music—Jorma
and Jack’s first LP, recorded live that spring with harmonica
player Will Scarlett sitting in, is a folkie’s delight. When
the Airplane disbanded in 1972, though, Hot Tuna went electric
and has largely re-mained so since then. For their show at
a roughly three-quarters-full Egg Sunday night, the Rock and
Roll Hall of Fame inductees Kaukonen and Casady teamed up
with mandolinist Barry Mitterhoff and drummer Eric Diaz for
two hourlong eclectic sets of acoustic blues, rock, classic
country, and swing.
Fellow Metroland music scribe David Greenberger, whom
I bumped into during the intermission, observed that Kaukonen
and Casady have played together for so long (since 1960, to
be exact) that they sounded like one instrument when playing
as a duo, and that some of that cohesion was lost with the
addition of the other players.
True, but something’s been gained as well. Diaz’s tasteful
drumming allowed Kaukonen to shoulder an electric guitar and
with it ratchet up the band’s intensity to recall at times
the raw, primal energy of the Airplane. Barry Mitterhoff,
a top bluegrass picker, also earned his keep by skillfully
adapting the mandolin to other styles—he could even rock out
with his electric axes. The most obvious downsides of Hot
Tuna’s expansion to a four-piece band, though, was that during
his electric-guitar tunes, Kaukonen’s singing (which has never
been strong) often got buried in the mix, and his lead- guitar
work occasionally lapsed into clichéd riffs.
The first set showcased more of the rootsy, acoustic side
of Hot Tuna’s music, and the second tilted toward the electric.
The rolling, sedate opener, “Sea Child,” found Mitterhoff
playing electric mandolin like a lead guitar as Kaukonen fingerpicked
an accompaniment. When the band broke into double time during
the Sippy Wallace blues classic “I Know You Rider,” Mitterhoff
changed gears to flash his bluegrass chops on his rich-toned
1942 Gibson F5 acoustic mandolin. Jack Casady, who played
with taste and precision all night, then contributed the first
of several fine bass solos. Later, Kaukonen’s rendition of
his Airplane-era fingerstyle guitar showpiece, “Embryonic
Journey,” was as flawless as the original.
They began the second set with Bukka White’s one-chord blues
tune, “Parchman Farm,” about the notorious Mississippi prison
where black inmates were sometimes killed for sport, and followed
it with a hard-driving minor-key blues, “Ode to Billie Dean.”
But then the band reverted to music with no harmonic movement
at all, two such tunes in a row, in fact: “I Wish You Would,”
and “99 Year Blues.” Toward the end of the second of these
I began to wonder if perhaps chords changed only when they
really wanted to change, but the next song, the intriguing
“Corners Without Exits,” dispelled such speculation when the
harmony started traveling again through sonorities both strange
and familiar.
They closed with a high-intensity electric tune, “#1 Hit Record,”
and encored with a rippling instrumental, “Water Song.” All
in all, Hot Tuna showed why their fans have stuck with them
all these years.
—Glenn
Weiser
|
Classifieds
