Bruce Springsteen LIVE in OC 12/4/12: "Faith Will Be Rewarded"

Photo: Kevin Sullivan, The Orange County Register   More photos here.

Offering up twenty-eight songs during a three and a half hour show at Orange County's Honda Center 12/4/12, Bruce Springsteen appeared genuinely giddy to be throwing himself into his work, crowdsurfing with the help of enthusiastic Anaheim fans. At sixty-three, Springsteen's energy was unstoppable and his voice sounded expressive and strong. Guest artist Tom Morello's guitar sounded equally expressive, intense, and also somehow guided by angels. Mesmerizing.

Photo: Nightwatchman Music.

A Mike Ness guest appearance, sharing ""Bad Luck" with Bruce, was also a gift cherished by OC locals who adore Social Distortion. The photo tribute to saxman Clarence Clemons who passed away June 18, 2011 felt cathartic on an evening filled with every human emotion, devastation giving way to celebration. My fave jam of the night was fan request "Reason to Believe" which, given the full E Street Band treatment, sounded like a child produced by ZZ Top and God, even more belief-baiting than the original version from the Nebraska album.

This year I've seen Springsteen give a raw and revealing Keynote at SXSW, help re-elect a president, and grab rave after rave after rave for his recent shows. On 12/12/12, he'll push back against the damage done by Hurricane Sandy with a benefit concert from New York's Madison Square Garden. Let's bet on the force of nature called Bruce.

To find where to watch the concert for Hurricane Sandy relief this Dec. 12, check resources here.

Springsteen asked for holiday donations to Second Harvest Orange County Food Bank. Donate here.

Music Mind Science: Duetting Musicians Sync Brainwaves Even When Playing Different Notes (Are Fans Tuned in Too?)

Jack White's audience at The Stage on Sixth, Austin, TX  Photo by Jo McCaughey

Fans have always been fascinated by music's effect on their moods, their minds. Now a new scientific study describes the profound physical changes that take place in the lobes of a musician's brain and details the synchronization of brain activity in musicians playing together. New scientific research published by Frontiers in Human Neuroscience and summarized by Liat Clark at Wired.co.uk shows how "duetting musicians sync brainwaves even when playing different notes." Does something similar go on in the minds of the fans? Music lovers routinely describe their own feelings of attunement with live music, the connection that the audience in Jo McCaughey's photo above experienced while enjoying an "unforgettable and highly exclusive Sixth Street performance during SXSW" by Paste magazine's Number One Live Act of the Year, Jack White, who is still on tour. (MMZ's S.X. Rosenstock and Karin Lindberg Freda are pictured down in front at The Stage on Sixth at Jack's mind-altering Austin show.) It was a night of neuroscientific bliss, MMZ's Favorite Live Show of 2012. And Jack White's shows at The Mayan and The Wiltern were amazing too. 

Pharrell: Holiday Gift Ideas for Music Minds

Playing with presents before wrapping them is so fun. Two music lovers on my list are getting copies of Pharrell’s new coffee-table book from Rizzoli. “Illustrated with lavish photography, this book also explores his musical career in depth, charting his many projects from his production team The Neptunes, to the band N.E.R.D., and his collaborations with friends Kanye West, Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg, and other hip-hop royalty.” Gorgeous.  

Jay-Z & Kanye "Watch the Throne" at Staples Center 12/13/11

All Photos by Karin Lindberg Freda

"We're living our dream in front of you, Los Angeles.
Know this shit is possible. We want to share this dream with you today".

The second of three sold-out LA shows at Staples Center. Two separate stages that rise and rise and rise. Extravagant light effects like lazers slicing the space. Drake in the audience. Enormous graphics of sharks, big cats, vicious dogs, predatory eagles, American flags. Kanye in a leather skirt. Jay-Z in a masterful show-length flow as winning as a perfect return of kickoff brought end zone to end zone. Harrowing images of white Christian families in KKK attire intercut with black Christians being baptized by immersion in the depths of a wide, rolling river as "No Church in the Wild" flowed by. A record-setting ten encores of  "In Paris" performed for cameras filming a new video for Watch the Throne's biggest hit. Perfection.

The National at the Hollywood Bowl 9/11/11

This post appears on The Huffington Post

All photographs by Karin Lindberg Freda

The National played a set at the Hollywood Bowl on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 that made their signature subjects--self-reproach, uncertainty, despair--turn sublime. The Brooklyn-based band made themselves at home headlining the Bowl, where they once opened for R.E.M. Their performance style is both intense and unpretentious. Their music is a thoughtful onslaught of guitars, percussion, keyboards, strings, horns, ideas and confessions. Lead singer Matt Berninger's deep voice drives fires through oceans of sound. They added lighting effects and a compelling background screen of images, including some evocations of 9/11. But the catharsis provided by The National occurs in the audio, even more than the visuals.

The ten hard years since the 9/11 attacks have permitted this band's slow ascent. The National's success counterpoints the world economy's decline over the past decade. Matt Berninger appears born to enunciate the depths of America's downturn.

He offers thrilling rants of frustration, well-placed profanities and mordant comedy and pairs these with other lyrics that appear oblique, fragmented and idiosyncratic. His words are all the more powerful for their refusal to be tidy or conventional. He'll set disparate thoughts side by side and let their estrangement speak the heartbreak of the song. Decency shows up in his writing, too. Berninger's lyrics sketch a decent American man whose hope, and lack of hope, keep making him complicit in tragedies big and tiny that he never intended, and can't often correct.

By opening the 9/11/11 show with the hard-won resolve of "Runaway," a song built around a promise not to run from the realities of relationship, and by allowing that promise to stay studded with more questions than answers, the band burnishes the louche hypotheses of its fine second album, Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers, into a rocky respectability. The slings and arrows of commitment to a partner, to anything, shock, overwhelm or even soothe as the song delivers amazing musical grace. This is the mature achievement of HIgh Violet and its predecessor Boxer, too: doubt, absurdity, even menace, are allowed to stand but a crescendo of terrified resilience pours through the songs.

"Runaway" was followed by "Anyone's Ghost," then "Slow Show," "Squalor Victoria," "Afraid of Everyone," with special guest St. Vincent, "Conversation 16," "Available," Cardinal Song," "Sorrow," which included a St. Vincent solo, "Abel," "England," Thirsty," "Fake Empire," Think You Can Wait," with Sharon Van Etten, "Mr. November," "Terrible Love," and "About Today."

Resilience depends, ironically, on an ability to cop to everything that jeopardizes it. The National's irony is anguished, not arch. When their chamber-music expertise  adds the jewel tones of horns and strings, an exquisite art school aesthetic adds dignity to The National's oeuvre of songs about screwing up. The dignity never becomes sedate, however, because it is under constant assault from one of rock's finest drummers, Bryan Devendorf, who plays like the love child of John Bonham and David Foster Wallace. Resilience never loses mystery or power because Scott Devendorf, Bryce Dessner and Aaron Dessner  play inspired, brainy guitars/bass and direct the Calder Quartet to play innovative horns.

Berninger's low voice has prompted comparisons with the usual suspects: Johnny Cash, Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen. Eddie Vedder, too. But try mixing in the David Bowie of the first notes of "Space Oddity" and all of "Heroes" as well as the Lou Reed of "Perfect Day" and "Satellite of Love" to really get Berninger's drift. Throw in baritone Bing Crosby's old Depression-era "Melancholy Baby." Baritone voices like Josh Turner or Idol winner Scotty McCreary often find a welcome home in country music and its conventions. That Berninger's baritone gives voice to a passionate, peculiar mind through various songs that style its owner as "a delicate man" with "girly arms" in "beloved white sleeves" marks him as a true original. He is sweet and sinister apple pie. He is all the wine.  

Arcade Fire gets an audience on its feet with huge ecstatic sounds designed to be transporting. Redemptive. The National offers, by way of contrast, standing room in an existential lounge and pie shop where Mitch Hedberg is reading The Myth of Sisyphus and a familiar Negative Creep keeps chanting, "my mind's not right, my mind's not right," while hot horns and dire drums and cagey words twist the night away into something impossibly beneficial.

Where will The National grow to after the success of High Violet? Through five albums, plus EPs and a new track "Exile Vilify" from the game Portal 2, they have stayed down-to-earth, desperate, ambitious, wistful, tasteful, furious, sad, and funny. They managed the opportunities of the Hollywood Bowl well but they are masters at creating a closer conversation with fans that a smaller venue provides, where Berninger can throw himself into his work and into the crowd all evening, not just once, as he did Saturday night during "Terrible Love."

The National welcomed three outstanding female artists to their Hollywood Bowl show. Sharon Van Etten warmed up, followed by Neko Case (with her guest T-Bone Burnett). St. Vincent joined The National during their set.

The National's tour continues to Singapore, Tokyo, and Australia.
 LINK to The National at www.americanmary.com

Sharon Van Etten

T-Bone Burnett and Neko Case

St. Vincent

For info on upcoming events at the Hollywood Bowl, click below

LINK to www.hollywoodbowl.com/

Sade at Honda Center 8/30/11: Style as Enlightenment

This post appears on  The Huffington Post.

Sade Adu photographed by Karin Lindberg Freda

Sade’s show at Honda Center in Anaheim August 30 was such a triumph of visual and sonic beauty, I started to wonder if pure gorgeousness could fix the economy or make political parties get along or point the way to world peace. Sade are a band of four musicians, not merely one stylish dame with a ponytail. Sade are Stuart Matthewman, Andrew Hale, Paul S. Denman, and Sade Adu, plus two inspired backing vocalists,  drummer, additional guitarist and percussionist.

Stuart Matthewman All Photos by Karin Lindberg Freda

Matthewman is every bit as essential to the band as singer Sade Adu. His sax and guitar create the twin sparks that make every song, the new stuff from the Soldier of Love album and the old stuff from the 1980s, so cool and so hot. Sade are not aloof; they are articulate. Sade are broken-heartedness and resilience. They play all the beauties of the budoir and all the agonies of desire’s defeat. Out of jazz, soul, reggae, pop and other influences, Matthewman, Hale and Denman build a unique edifice. 

Sade’s grooves are not the backdrop for aural wallpaper, they are an architecture of rumination, confession, and connection unlike any other.

Ryan Waters & Stuart Waterman at Honda Center 8/30

Singer Sade is so timelessly elegant, time itself seems happy to have lost, in this one instance, its ability to degrade and diminish. She is beautiful in her black pants and top as she opens the show as the “Soldier of Love” who has survived the eighties, nineties, aughts and the insults of our present day.  She is both a dashing diva and humble member of an ensemble in a boyish white shirt and black vest.  She is beyond beautiful barefoot in a white gown that discloses  the lace of a cerise brassiere.  You have to call up Garbo and Josephine Baker, Audrey Hepburn and Halle Berry to begin to describe Sade Adu’s allure but these don’t account for the genius of her freckles. Beyoncé is pretty; Sade is profound. Divine.

More than any singer except Joni Mitchell, Sade Adu makes me appreciate the truthtelling audiences get when a songwriter sings her own words and is not interpreting the thoughts, however brilliant, of someone else.  All lyrics on the new album are credited to S. Adu.  Her words work through the grooves of the songs with a pristine persistence, often delivered as a commanding hush.  The process of a Sade song resolves suffering into survival.  In “Skin” she confronts excruciating knowledge.“When I found out this love’s undone/I was like a gun” and she arrives at a truth about lost love few are willing to face and tells it terse: “It couldn’t be right cos you’re not right within.” The album is filled with invaluable clear-eyed compositions. As a writer, her ability to chant a problem always includes a rare capacity to out-think and outlast desperation by detailing it, riding it all the way through to a return to dignity. Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac, born Christine Perfect, is a singer-songwriter whose alto accomplishes a similar restrained grace.  I scavenge through lists of other vocalists who possess greater natural gifts —Dame Cleo Laine, Cassandra Wilson, Feist, Norah Jones, Yukimi Nagano—to find a way to praise what Sade’s ability to muse aloud achieves. The sumptuous stoicism of her voice translates grief into relief. On Tuesday night her vocals improved from the opening notes of “Soldier of Love” followed by “Your Love Is King,” finding commanding expression in “Jezebel” and every song after it. Her words, presence and canny collaborations with the band and two supporting vocalists combine to make Sade Adu a singer of colossal authority.

The band’s good taste finds elegant fulfillment in the design and direction of the show, credited to Sade and Sophie Muller.The musicians are often surrounded by three walls of a white opaque curtain swathed in stunning projected images. This cocoon of pictures arrives and leaves gracefully. Visual projections evoke noir and neon for “Smooth Operator” without appearing trite or retro. Silhouettes of dancers are both classic and contemporary.  The design and pacing are exquisite without a moment of posturing or preciousness. Kate Betts’s recent book, Everyday Icon: Michelle Obama and the Power of Style, points out that Americans are deeply suspicious of style and stylishness. Puritans among us construe it as an enemy of sincerity.  Everything about Sade’s show, the visuals, the costumes, the setlist, Sade’s generous intros of her mates and their group curtain call, and also the way many in the Orange County crowd dressed up for the evening, argues for style as an outcome of sincerity. 

Will we have to wait another ten years for our next dose of high style-as-sanity from Sade? We can continue to groove to the recordings, to the old “Lovers Live” DVD that shows another devoted, rapturous So Cal audience. We can celebrate how style places us in our own survival’s hands when we see how the grand gown of allure really does look best accessorized with the bare feet of resilience and resolve.

John Legend opened with a beautiful set. 

The Sade/John Legend tour continues. Info at Sade.com.

" . . . the Poet, Amy Winehouse . . . "

Trying to find an estimable appreciation of Amy Winehouse's gifts as songwriter and vocalist that provides an insightful response to her suffering has been hard to find the past two days. For me there are only Ann Powers here and, her earlier LA Times piece here, and Ed Pavlic here. His pushback against Daphne L. Brooks' 2008 repudiation of Winehouse in The Nation online contains the essential directive, "let's us in her audience (critics and especially professors!) go a little easy on the poet Amy Winehouse." Is it because Pavlic, like Powers, notices something I have noticed, too? Powers sees that, "women's suffering has often inspired admiration from audiences whose embrace of their tragic heroine can seem like equal parts sympathy and sadism." Powers' strong, hastily-penned piece rightly canonizes the artistry of Winehouse's melodies, words, vocal risk-taking, and iconic self-presentation. ("I just dress like I'm an old Jewish black man. I just dress like it's still the '50s.") Winehouse created important work. In a music industry ruled by manufactured female mouths, Winehouse burned with personal expressiveness and intensity. "I think 'Back to Black' is one of those albums," Powers writes, "like Nick Drake's 'Pink Moon,' that touched on such deep emotion that it forms a huge legacy unto itself." I'll push that further. The emotion and intensity are merely the means. Genius of the kind possessed by Winehouse and Drake does art's most mysterious job; it genuinely explicates ends. "And none of you stand so tall/ pink moon gonna get you all."