Bruce Hornsby & The Noisemakers
Warner Theatre, Washington D.C., September 28, 2024
In September I saw two shows during which fans shouted “Broooooce” between songs. That’s a bit entertaining in its own right, although the shows couldn’t’ve been more different in every other way. Springsteen did a massive set at a baseball stadium, and
Bruce Hornsby & The Noisemakers were at a show in the genteel downtown Warner Theatre, which I had walked by for years without ever going into. (I would be back a week or so later for James and Johnny Marr.)
I really don’t know Bruce Hornsby’s music much at all, other than the hits in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and this was a ticket I got for my wife and me as a LiveNation promotion with a discount. So we were initially up in the upper balcony before we were offered to come down to the main floor, as there was a lot of empty space.
Honestly, it was all really great. Hornsby’s band, The Noisemakers (or Noise Makers, they were not consistent) whom he’s led for the past quarter-century, is a large ensemble that can segue from New Orleans-style jazz improvisations to bluegrass-inflected roots-rock, and he plays a role of bandleader, with an iPad in front of him with the lyrics and chord changes for a show that changes from night to night as the mood strikes him.
As I knew, Hornsby has credentials and a history in the jam band scene, having played more than 100 shows with the Grateful Dead in their latter days, so the freewheeling approach to a set makes a lot of sense. The Noisemakers remind me, in their scale and instrumentation, as jam band-adjacent, at most, which is good because my tolerance for aimless soloing is limited. Instead, under Hornsby’s leadership, the ensemble brings in some of the touchstones of country, jazz, blues, and bluegrass, but keeping a focus on the song structures. Within that format, Hornsby’s pop hits were significantly reinvented, often transformed from their studio versions with long digressions into other material but not losing the thread melodically.
Speaking candidly, Hornsby’s singing has grown notably weaker over time and he relies on a whispery croon at moments, rather than full-throated vocals that he displayed back in the days of the The Range as his band. But his instrumental virtuosity was unimpeded. Of course I know him as a pianist, and he was beyond the keyboard for most of the set, but he also picked up an accordion later in the show, and to my surprise, a variety of dulcimers. My wife, who knew only the pop hits, remarked, “I had no idea he was so talented,” an otherwise banal statement but it also conveyed his casual mastery. And humor, too. He wryly threw in a bit of Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May” before “M.I.A. in M.I.A.M.I.” - why? because of the phonemic linkage, maybe? And according to the
extraordinary detailed write-up on setlist.fm, he also cited everyone from György Ligeti to his own compositions which became hits for Huey Lewis (“Jacob’s Ladder, a song I had genuinely no idea he’d written) and of course Don Henley (“The End of the Innocence”). I particularly liked the way he presented “Mandolin Rain,” maybe my favorite of his hits, opening with gentle mandolin soloing meant to mimic the sound of rain falling on a lake, diverging into lengthy piano solos conveying the song’s tenor of melancholy and regret.
I never quite loved “The Way It Is,” Hornsby’s biggest solo hit. Its sincerity and social conscience seemed almost cloying at the time, in the midst of the Reagan-Bush era. I do like how a
generation of
hip-hop artists picked up on its theme of isolation and societal decay to bring it into a new social context. And on that note, he did “Prairie Dog Town,” which he apparently wrote for Snoop, on dulcimer.
The crowd was … not huge, which is probably why we got invited down to the main floor, but it was enthusiastic and heartfelt. I know his audiences come from a variety of eras, from his chart-topping days in the 1980s to his tenure with the Grateful Dead, but he’s been with the Noisemakers for a quarter-century now, and the nominal theme of the tour was the 25th anniversary of
Spirit Trail, a record I never listened to, but whose horrendous cover art I recall seeing in record stores. But only one song was actually from that record, the band’s extended digression on “Sneaking Up on Boo Radley” (with the György Ligeti interlude).
The opening act, of which I’d never heard, was called
Heavy MakeUp, and was composed of two 20-something looking guys on horns and electronics, dressed all in black, and a woman who appeared to be the coolest mom in the carpool drop-off lane in a prosperous suburban school district: jeans jacket, flowing hair turning from blonde to gray, wealthy-hippie vibes. She opened up her mouth to sing, and I immediately said to my wife, “She sounds like Edie Brickell.”
Well, guess what. Edie Brickell has a band called Heavy MakeUp, and this is it. The two dudes are CJ Camerieri and Trever Hagen, and they handle mild subdued electronica beats with horn solos and Brickell’s yearning, ruminative songwriting and singing. Their recent single
“Here It Comes” gives a sense of their overall vibe. It was all very pleasant, and Brickell showed a bit of admirable self-deprecation about the whole thing, if somewhat mild. If you remember the days of folktronica and related cross-genre explorations, there are some similarities there. It’s a bit upscale-suburban-mall in terms of tone and affect, nothing too abrasive or too out-there for comfortable listening, but the wide-eyed wonder that you will recall from Edie Brickell and New Bohemians’ “What I Am” or “Circle” is recast surprisingly well to these light-electronica settings.
Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 10/15/2024 12:41PM by zwirnm.
