Joan Armatrading at Mass MoCA Aug. 3

by Seth Rogovoy

(NORTH ADAMS, Mass., Aug. 4, 1999) - The Hunter Center for the Performing Arts got its unveiling as a venue for pop music on Tuesday night when English singer-songwriter Joan Armatrading brought her mixture of power ballads and power chords to an enthusiastic crowd of fans at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

Backed by her four-piece band of Englishmen, Armatrading performed a set of favorites spanning her career from the early-'70s through the '90s, from pre-disco dance tunes to post-AIDS lamentations.

The threads uniting Armatrading's far-flung material were her themes of interpersonal and intrapersonal struggle and, in her most capable hands, the power of music to explore these themes. Here lies the paradox at the heart of Armatrading's craft, fueling her songs with tension and, in concert, accounting for their relative success and failure.

At the same time that Armatrading dramatized emotional turmoil in songs she played including "Cool Blue Stole My Heart," "Love and Affection" and "The Weakness in Me" - songs that are just personal enough to tug at heartstrings but not so particular as to prevent deep and widespread projection and identification among her loyal listeners -- she delivered them in highly personal, ecstatic readings that demanded she withdraw inward for their emotional resonance.

In other words, Armatrading's highly stylized aesthetic parallels the very ambivalences about which she sings: in order to connect with her audience, she needs to disconnect. In most plain fashion, this meant not singing most of her songs out or to the audience, but closing her eyes and singing them to herself.

In a crowd highly primed for precisely this dynamic, one could feel the energy of listeners going with Armatrading into that deep space of inner, emotional isolation. This is the very opposite of gospel music, a style of expression which seeks to achieve inner, spiritual transcendence through outward, lively testifying.

Much of Armatrading's pop style, however, is rooted in gospel and other African-American-derived genres, including blues, R&B and soul, and the inward tug of her performance was often at odds with the music's more effusive, outgoing tendencies.

This flaw also had its parallel on a basic, technical level of performance. What was ostensibly meant to be an "unplugged" show - Armatrading and her bassist played acoustic guitars, a drummer and multi-instrumentalist added acoustic percussion and woodwind backup, only a keyboardist made limited use of electronics - the arrangements were loud and heavy and often overwhelmed Armatrading.

That's not easy to do, as Armatrading exudes unusual warmth and her voice is a rich, elastic, idiosyncratic instrument with a huge range. Nevertheless and with few exceptions, all the instruments - including her own guitar -- were mixed so loudly together that they all ganged up on her. Even turning up her vocals only served to flatten out the overall attack.

Except for a few moments where she paused the show to speak directly to the audience, to tell a story about a song, or, in one strange sequence, to halt mid-song and leave the stage and then leave again at the end of the song, only to return in a matter of seconds, Armatrading did not take advantage of the opportunity to communicate directly with the audience in an unadorned fashion.

Chalk it up to shyness or insecurity, or the simple desire to rock out, which Armatrading most certainly did on tunes like "Kissin' and a Huggin'," "Me Myself I" and "Drop the Pilot," capping an evening which left many hungry for more such class acts at MoCA.

Opener Cathy Grier had no problems emoting outwardly, although about a third of the way into her over-long set one wished she had. Grier boasted some considerable natural gifts, not the least of which was her own, powerfully versatile voice, aptly tuned for blues and jazz. But at this point in her career it's an untamed monster that Grier needs to learn to control for fear of wearing out her audience fast.

Grier, who is white, relied largely on African-American-derived styles like blues, jazz, and funk. There's nothing wrong with that in and of itself. She does, however, need to expand her musical vocabulary beyond the basic forms, especially the one- and two-chord funk vamps that do her meandering melodies no favor.

And until she spends some considerable time in the woodshed reading policy journals or learning to write transcendently poetic lyrics, she ought to ditch the incredibly naïve and unsophisticated political talk strewn through her songs and stage patter - she called for "spending lottery money on poverty," apparently unaware or the irony that the lion's share of lottery tickets are purchased by low-income customers, and in another song repeatedly intoned the words "Rain forest, jungle," as a kind of automatic, liberal mantra - all of which had this lifelong Democrat wanting to run out of the auditorium and vote Republican just to spite her.

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