Live at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center, Santa Cruz, California
by John Simmons (17 April 2020, Snazzy Productions)
The first chunk of magic at this show
happens at the very start, when no one is paying much
attention. "I'll just start playin'," Jack Elliott says softly,
"and we'll just pretend we never met. We're just sittin' on a
street corner, I'm buskin', and it's 1960." And the room
settles as the barrier between performer and audience melts
away. That's not a world-famous folk musician and historical
figure up on a stage, it's just a street singer. Or, better,
it's your black-sheep uncle with the beat-up guitar, just
passing through, singing songs full of hidden codes to us kids
while the parental units look on uncomfortably. Relax, Martha,
its only folk music. What harm can he do?
Considerable harm, it turns out. But that's another story.
A
Ramblin' Jack Elliott show at this phase of his career is a
seamless and unscripted blending of story and song, of history
and melody. His propensity to tell stories used to irritate,
because the stories seemed to suck energy from the songs, but
that was years ago. He now has, through art or pure
artlessness, found the balance. Describing the music scene that
developed around Gerde's Folk City in the early 60s in New York
City (a recurring reference point for Jack as well as for John
Stewart, the evening's second performer), he recalled this
tidbit:
"I was tellin' how Bob Dylan got disgusted
with New York and decided to leave Greenwich Village and move
up to Woodstock. He'd been living in this little apartment on
4th Street. It was just big enough for a bed and a little table
with a typewriter… One day on 6th Avenue he says to me,
'I'm getting out of town. I'm gonna leave here. I'm going up to
Woodstock and I'm gonna be a painter. I'm not gonna be in this
music business anymore -- this music business is getting to me.
It's too weird. Too many weirdos. I'm gonna be a painter.' And
I said, "Good luck, Bob," and that was it. He left and I didn't
see him again for about a year." How odd that Jack's Dylan
impersonation is so good …
Take my word for it, this was material that
the audience was hungry for. Nobody was waiting impatiently for
the next song to start. But when the songs came along they were
crisp as jewels in the settings made for them by the
storytelling. "Freight Train Blues", "Pretty
Boy Floyd", a cracked-up version of
"Lay Lady Lay", and especially "Don't
Think Twice", each one a classic,
were delivered not slickly but honestly, among jokes and edgy
stories, as befits the time-honored tradition of the
black-sheep uncle.
(Speaking of which tradition, I later saw
Genuine American Eccentric and noted musicologist Baby Gramps
sneak backstage to hang with his old buddy Jack. I'd love to be
a blue-tailed fly on that wall.)
In the middle of the final song of his
encore, Blind Lemon Jefferson's creepy-beautiful "Black Snake
Moan", this Grammy-winning Famous Artist stopped dead, peered
into the audience, and said: "Chet? Is that you? Just
recognized you." The audience loved it. Just another evening
with Mad Uncle Jack.
[John Stewart] gave
the audience his
version of his first meeting with
Jack Elliott at Gerde's (Jack had given his own version earlier
in the show), as well as his first brush with Dylan, to
introduce "Dreamers on the Rise". Very apt and very smoothly
done.
For folk purists, this show highlighted two
different but successful approaches to long-term survival. I
grudgingly concede that there is some art to booking after
all.
(Excerpted material recorded at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center on
4/17/99. Mix by Julie Rix. Recorded by Dave Nielsen of
Technica Gratia Artes.)
this here article been dug up at http://www.snazzyamericanamusic.com/RJEreviewpage.htm
