CONCERT REVIEW
Vance Gilbert's dazzling display
by Seth Rogovoy(NORTH ADAMS, Mass., April 6, 1997) -- At one point during his manic show at Milltown Studios on Sunday evening, singer-songwriter Vance Gilbert joked that "folk music is to be endured, not enjoyed." Gilbert could get away with such a seemingly self-defeating generalization because the only thing the crowd had to endure at his show were sore cheek muscles from laughing and smiling so much at the performer's hyper antics and dizzying vocal pyrotechnics. Gilbert played a bunch of great songs, too, as he treated the audience to two sets of jazzy, original folk songs, rich in melody and deep in characterization.
It was telling that Gilbert's sets each began with cover songs by classic pop tunesmiths -- the first with a Jimmy Webb composition, the second with a George Gershwin tune -- because underlying the veneer of Gilbert's contemporary folk lies the heart of a pop classicist in love with the sheer power of melody and expression. (They were also a nod to his early career as a cocktail lounge singer.) And Gilbert comes equipped with an arsenal that includes a gift for the melodic line, a seemingly effortless tenor and a jazzy, percussive guitar style.
As a writer, Gilbert favors character sketches and narratives over introspective, confessional lyrics -- the better to enjoy rather than to endure, no doubt. In "Pound of Prevention," the singer told the first-person account of a bank teller taken hostage by a female bank robber. "Dear Amelia" was a love letter to the famed pilot that imagined what her final moments must have been like. "Lightnin' Rod" told the story of a man who attracted more than his fair share of trouble, and "Just the Way That It Was" imagined the mindset of a man whose rage got the better of him.
What all these songs have in common -- indeed, what seems to interest Gilbert the most as a writer -- is how the lives of those on the margins of society tell us more about ourselves than we might like to think. Coming as he does from his own marginal, outsider position as a black man in the lily-white world of contemporary folk, it is perhaps not surprising that Gilbert is drawn to these themes, and even less surprising that his portraits resonate with such luminous clarity.
Gilbert peppered his program with hysterically funny tangents that he explained as symptoms of "folk Tourettes." He also dazzled the crowd with a few off-microphone a capella numbers of immense power, and did a sort of vocal rendition of a muted trumpet duetting with a vocalist. You had to be there -- you should have been. His was the only show in the Music on Main Street series that garnered a well-earned standing ovation.
Northampton singer-songwriter Max Cohen did some dazzling of his own warming up the crowd with a few virtuosic guitar instrumentals and a couple of funny numbers, including a farewell love song to a beloved Chevy Chevette and an irreverent, sadistic version of "Mr. Bojangles."
[This review originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on April 8, 1997. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1997. All rights reserved.]
Seth Rogovoy
rogovoy@berkshire.net
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