Location: Jamski dvorec / Postojna
Gig date: 17.02.2010
Attendance: 200
Ticket price: 14 €
The Postojna blues festival, now in its sixth edition, is spoiling us shamelessly with its concert lineup. Just how shamelessly shaky luck can be, we saw last Thursday, when old acquaintance Ian Siegal took over the Jamski dvorec for a good two hours. The Brit with a heavily accented American drawl jumped into the program practically at the last minute, after the juicy gals of Cherry Brake Wells pulled out. Siegal’s crew showed up as a trio: Ian on guitar and vocals, bassist Andy Graham and drummer Nikolaj Bjerre.
Ian Siegal carries a reputation as a musician with blues in his blood, but as Thursday’s gig showed, the old boy is happy to mix in a few alcohol-based fluids too. Who knows, maybe the temptation of a glass of firewater on a freezing Postojna night was simply too much to resist. Naturally, the script for the evening was pretty much sealed from there. Siegal launched into a demonstration of basic blues folklore which, given the rather static sound setup, was stingy with the emotional sparks you’d expect. Inspired instrumental moments were few and far between (especially in the first half of the set); in fact, the trio at times came across as downright unserious, if not outright uninterested, which often spilled into soulless, empty improvisations, around which piled up limp covers of rock and blues standards in the role of program “fillers.” A similar “goofing-off” syndrome took hold of Ian Siegal himself. His guitar playing was accordingly less focused on distilling the essence of blues rock and mostly sounded lukewarm, and the old boy happily made up for that shortcoming by firing off out-of-place comments that fell flat on the intended comic effect again and again, like they were coming off an assembly line. The response of the already traditionally reserved Slovenian crowd was consequently reduced to a few scattered and far-from-sincere shouts of enthusiastic approval.
Of course, it would be wrong to say that Ian Siegal has no knack for “serving up” solid blues-rock goods. After all, the old boy once upon a time even drove the engine of the backing band of ex-Rolling Stones buddy Bill Wyman, and Ian walked away with an enviably fat bouquet of sympathies on his last visit to Postojna too, in September 2007 (RockLine report here), when the Englishman had the honor of opening the Postojna Blues festival season. Given the general mood, the guitarist somewhat surprisingly neutralized the nagging, rather sour aftertaste hanging over the evening with unexpected flashes of inspired playing on “Falling On Down Again,” while “Take A Walk In The Wilderness” earned itself some well-deserved room for sentimentality. Two rare moments of the night that were genuinely enjoyable.
That Ian grew up wearing down guitar necks is as undeniable as his talent. Still, we’d recommend the gentleman a pinch more professionalism toward the audience next time. The Postojna crowd in particular deserves a heaping dose of commitment and artistic spark from the people on stage, since for half a dozen years now it has been practically the only driving force behind any real blues action in Slovenia.
Photos: Mojca Perdih
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