Last nights sellout show was great. Mayall at 76 years of age is amazingly energetic and lucid. The venue holds about 500 people and JM was doing the whole meet and greet while offering a signed copy the new CD for a reasonable fee. He was very approachable and chatty. He is one of those guys that I have had many opportunities to see but always either had something higher up the priority list to do/see or just felt that I would catch him another time. I'm really glad I finally took the opportunity.
Onstage he is very obviously the musical director and even though he sometimes missed the odd cue, the band simply shifted to accommodate him almost seamlessly. At one point he announced that they would be playing a song by one of Australia's premier blues bands the Bondi Cigars. Bassist Greg Rzab (12 years with Buddy Guy plus a huge list of other notables) looked at Mayall, spread his hands and said "man I dont know that song". JM grinned and got drummer Jay Davenport to start. Rzab started playing a pentatonic groove which had a good swing to it. They got about 6 bars in and Mayall stopped them saying it needed to be more snappy. Away they went again with Rzab intently chasing the changes and to be honest looking a bit stressed. Far from looking amateurish it came across as a band that were enthusiastic enough to play outside their comfort zone not to mention a song that Australian blues listeners are familiar with and they did it it well.
I loved the fact that it humanised a guy like Greg Rzab. I told him this after the show and he said that he hadn't considered that it would come across that way. Greg had literally just got off a plane from Seattle that afternoon and like me doesn't sleep well on planes. So he had gone pretty much 3 nights without sleep. Considering this the guy played incredibly well. Actually, even if he had slept for the last week he played incredibly well.
His solo was a mixture of cool grooves , flashy tricks for the showman side of things (not overdone IMHO) and very accurate melodic spontaneous expression.
His playing during the main parts of the songs was relaxed and his grooves are solid as Ayers Rock. He has a very deft touch but when he breaks out he can go very quickly in the direction of Victor Wooten. I was impressed with his capacity to choose his feel at different times. He always got it right and I don't believe he ever overplayed. With his chops it would be just too easy a mistake to make.
He was a lovely bloke and was very hyped about the fact that his bass which is a Michael Tobias 5 string played as well as he had hoped at its debut gig. He played through an Eden (not sure which model) into 2 Ampeg 4 x 10's.
Mayall plinked and plonked a bit in some of the longer jams on his keyboard and you could hear that some of the deft control of his fingers is slipping just a bit but hey its blues! Tight but loose right? he didn't play guitar at all which I was a bit disappointed in. I know he is not in the league of some of the players he has had in his band but I would still have liked to see him play. I can only assume his fingers were giving him some trouble.
Speaking of tight, Jay Davenport the drummer has a driving and quite snappy style while still retaining a lot of that Chicago blues groove. The crowd were particularly impressed with him. Which was nice considering no one here has heard of him. He received a huge reception whenever Mayall said his name which was about 5 times.
As they went through some of the older songs like the stuff from Beano and Hard Road guitarist Rocky Athas presented himself to an audience that had never heard of him with grace, style and controlled power. He was a pleasure to watch and listen to. He did what Warren Haynes does so well in that he was able to play classic fixed in stone lines buy such great players as Clapton yet still give them his own treatment and make them his own. Very impressive.
Long time Al Jarreau keyboardist Tom Canning completed the lineup. His Hammond and Rhodes sounds were a good foil for JM's piano sound. He tended to over do the whole Little Richard thing a bit to my ears and I got the impression his chops were just short of the mark, like he wasn't quite gig fit. I unfortunately relate to him a bit in this respect.
Overall it was a thoroughly entertaining night which ended far quicker than I felt it should even though they played for nearly 2 hours.
