Music Comes First with Oteil & the Peacemakers
Posted by: Lana
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By: Lawrence Specker
For: Everything Alabama
Days after, I'm still mulling the incredible blend of raw material I heard heated to the welding point on Saturday by Oteil Burbridge and the Peacemakers.
Mahavishnu Orchestra and fusion-era Miles Davis, to be sure. And AC/DC and Led Zeppelin, both of whom were quoted in the show's opening riffs. And Hank Williams Sr., whose "Kaw-Liga" got a thunderous cover. And probably a whole bunch more that I enjoyed without necessarily identifying them.
The early surprise, given Burbridge's personal reputation and excitement over the participation of Widespread Panic guitarist Jimmy Herring, was the phenomenal skill of the Peacemakers. Burbridge's young sidemen were talented and confident enough that Herring took the role of a friend among equals, rather than a big fish visiting a small bowl.
In some cases, the group probably was paying overt tribute to its influences. In others, maybe they were just reaching for the same thing others had reached for and the connection existed only in my imagination. At times I could almost hear Karl Denson and Follow For Now, a short-lived and much-lamented black funk/metal group that roared out of Atlanta in the early '90s and, based on talent, deserved to make as big a splash as Living Colour or Fishbone.
But either way, thank God for shows like this, that remind you the music comes first and the labels come later. Spend too much time trying to put stuff into words, or letting the music industry do it for you, and you can lose track of that.
But under the landscape of easy shorthand terms are the continental plates of cultural tradition, and under that is magma, where all these supposedly separate types of bedrock flow and fuse together. Sometimes a gifted artist, or group of them, opens up a volcano and lets you enjoy things on that deeper level.
It can make you think. It can make you quit thinking and dance. Me, I think.
Other musicians play with time, I thought on Saturday. What distinguishes funk is when a group of musicians glance at each other and decide they're going to stretch time out like a big old wad of warm taffy and play Cat's Cradle with it for a few bars.
And true fact: The first reliably functioning time machine will be a musical instrument, not a scientific apparatus as such. I present this as fact because Jimi Hendrix came back from the future on Saturday night to tell me so. No surprise there -- as any thinking listener knows, he always was from the future.
But that's beside the point, which is that occasionally you get reminded that the music that surprises you the most also tends to be the music that rewards you the most.
Elsewhere in today's Bay Weekend there's a story I find fascinating, about Willie Nelson playing with a Wynton Marsalis ensemble in a program presented by Jazz at Lincoln Center.
Get too locked in to genre labels and reputations and you think: Willie Nelson? Wynton Marsalis? Jazz at Lincoln Center? That can't be right. It's a stunt.
But as writer Nate Chinen shows, the music itself isn't limited by any of that stuff. Unique ingredients make for a unique experience -- and yes, a thought-provoking one. Can all the disparate offspring of the blues really reunite and bring something new to the blues? Evidently so.
And getting back to my own experience, when Burbridge led the peacemakers and Herring in a song that talked about pulling together and tearing down the walls, it was more than a metaphor. It was exactly what they were doing.
And it was great to be along for the eruption.
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