I had the opportunity to see Joe Jackson last night on his "Four decade tour".
What a band! Versatile and rocking. They can get quite jazzy, silky smooth, latin-esque grooves, or kick ass as needed on the early tunes.
It's pretty harmonically adventurous material. Bassist Graham Maby has been with JJ since the very early days and played on pretty much any recording you may be thinking of. (My band used to cover "Is She Really Going Out with Him" and I always enjoyed the staccato verses and melodic bass licks on that one, though we gave it up because we could never get the vocal harmonies to sound good!). One thing that was really fun was seeing how much Joe obviously enjoyed this band, whenever they really took off he'd be looking around at the other players with glee on his face. At one point he said to the audience, "People often tell me I should do a solo tour by myself, but I don't want to, it's so much more fun with a band."
Anyway, it's a very good live show if you can get a chance to see it. I believe a lot of dates are sold out though
I've been acquainted with current guitarist Teddy Kumpel since I was a very small child.
Teddy got me an unexpected backstage pass - as I was told to expect, Mr. Jackson did not appear backstage after the show, but I did get to hang with Teddy and reminisce about the time he was babysitting me and my sister and almost got us drowned in mud.
And - nice surprise! I got to briefly meet and express my admiration to Mr Maby, who has a very warm and gentle presence in person, seems like a good soul.
There's various fan videos from this tour on youtube already, here's a song (from last week) that sounded great last night:
