Venue: Jamski dvorec / Postojna
Concert date: February 4, 2009
Attendance: 300
Ticket price: €14
Last Thursday, Postojna hosted the next installment of the only credible blues festival in Slovenia, which for the fifth year running has been stubbornly defying the monopoly of spiritual poverty on the concert scene on the sunny side of the Alps. This time we got a visit from a fella by the name of Johnny Sansone, a funny, lanky guy who, by some strange coincidence, took over the halls of Jamski dvorec together with none other than the Jumpin’ Johnny Sansone Blues Band.
Johnny is no joke. The old-timer has cut his teeth in plenty of mostly blues-oriented outfits, but these days he likes to work with a pretty unusual stew of musical influences. And Johnny is not short on confidence. Right off the bat, the man warned us that his live repertoire consists of original music only. A bold move, and with the stepmotherly coldness of his delivery he threw the Postojna audience, used to feasting on countless spicy arrangements of more or less familiar blues standards, for a moment, but with some slick showman moves he soon turned the crowd’s uncertainty into a feeling of great expectations. Johnny Sansone clearly doesn’t have a particularly modest opinion of his own work, which, in the end, is fair enough. The man split his show into two parts, proudly pointing to the creative and performing diversity of his own sound. First he hit us with a colorful collage of free-reed harmonica sounds woven between thick layers of rowdy rattling, taking us on a steady stroll from rhythm & blues all the way to country, while the second half of the night was reserved for some truly unforgettable and venomous outpourings of blues, and by the end Johnny even spurted out a few jets of rock ‘n’ roll!
The zydeco and r & b turns of Jumpin’ Johnny’s repertoire are admittedly a musical excursion of their own kind, but after barely half an hour of stubborn harmonica droning, the initial excitement soon gave way to signs of monotony. Johnny skillfully dodged those with cleverly planted mood and dynamic swings for the better part of the first half, during which there was still no sign of a mouth harp anywhere. In such a mostly accordion-driven environment, what you heard most was the aforementioned zydeco, and there was no shortage of strong country aromas either. In short, there was precious little real blues. If you belong to the more orthodox blues lovers, these moments must have been getting more uncomfortable by the minute, especially if, like yours truly, you’d been bursting with joy for days before the show at the prospect of a visit from one of the last students of the one and only Little Walter.
Slowly but surely, Johnny started steering the evening in the expected direction with the song Crescent City Moon, which presented itself as the blues heartbeat of New Orleans. Here the man used the full sound of the harmonica to build a heavy melodic curtain in front of us, then finished it off with sharp, soulful vocals. Johnny is a master of musical rhetoric, whose power is without exception built on the daring combination of numerous, seemingly incompatible elements of expression. On top of that, Johnny is also an excellent motivator, an ideal frontman who knows exactly when to hit the gas pedal, and he’s just as skilled at handling the more sentimental stuff. We got a good dose of that on Thursday night. Look At Us Now, for instance, carried a more positive dimension that hinted at bluesy roots only here and there, while the acoustic dip through You Got Me betrayed almost pop-oriented impulses. There was no lack of party-style winks at an almost hillbilly-flavored performance either, all of it heavily caricatured by the evening’s main protagonist, who always pulled a new ace out of his sleeve to crank up the temperature. Be that as it may, dynamics are one of the main trademarks of Jumpin’ Johnny’s circus, which on top of everything presented itself as an extremely disciplined little troop. The man subordinated the band down to the last detail to his own particular way of expressing himself; at times it seemed like his crew was already breathing down his neck almost too obediently.
But we finally got it! That gritty sound of the much-missed mouth harp, that is. Johnny first served it up with a deadly execution of the instrumental Quagmire, which came across as a thrilling mix of caricatured blues with a touch of soul. Johnny filled his steamy oral relationship with his metal girlfriends by juggling all sorts of colorful tonalities, but if we’re being totally honest, there’s nothing earth-shatteringly different in his playing compared to, say, the moves of Postojna’s old acquaintance Sugar Blue. Johnny is surely an excellent harp player, but in what he does he’s a tad less radical than his contemporaries. The old guy hides his main aces in the use of vivid color shades from a cheerfully rotating palette of moods, which he handles in the style of a true grand master. Besides that, unlike his colleagues, Johnny rarely looks for excuses for long improvisations, which leaves him plenty of room to dictate the pace of fiery emotional dialogues that, in search of a good conversation partner, he often swaps with the audience itself. Somewhere in the middle of the show, right at the start of the second part to be exact, the ecstasy curve plunged to a point of total intimacy, and Jamski dvorec wrapped itself in complete silence. That’s when Johnny Sansone went for the last in a series of brilliant mood maneuvers, which cut the evening right down the middle and, with a slide in his hand, brought us a step closer to the sound of traditional blues for a moment. But only for a moment. The acoustic Happyness, Love And Lies was followed, by the now familiar recipe, by the love song Marry Full Of Tears, which didn’t skimp on more listenable elements, though the sonic balance between the two was soon shattered by the return of the arrogant wail of the harmonica. Lively, no doubt about it!
Thursday night was certainly one of the more thrilling ones so far this blues season. Jumpin’ Johnny Sansone Blues Band wowed us with an exceptional knack for working the crowd, as well as a sense for tapping a vast reservoir of sonic influences, fused into a unique whole with which he fearlessly, and without a break, spoke to listeners of quite different genre persuasions. The determination and energy of his performance can therefore be seen as a textbook example of modern stage language, one that guarantees plenty of joyful moments for all generations of music enthusiasts.
Photos: Mojca Perdih
Setlist
1. Your Kind Of Love 2. Sweet Baby 3. Anything Anytime 4. Crescent City Moon 5. Comin’ For Sure 6. Just Say Yes 7. Quagmire 8. You Know Who 9. Civilized City 10. Look At Us Now 11. Give Me A Dollar 12. Poorman’s Paradise 13. Happyness, Love And Lies 14. You Got Me 15. Mary Full Of Tears 16. Think Of Me 17. Be For Sure 18. Uncle Joe 19. The Bridge 20. Destination Unknown 21. Watermalon Patch
Photo gallery
