Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Vrba na Koroškem (Velden Am Wörthersee) / Bluesiana Rock Cafe / Austria
Concert date: 18.10.2016
Attendance: 70
Ticket price: €33.00 (advance) / €38.00 (day of show)
For Scott Henderson’s new show at the big temple of good music in Austrian Carinthia, I’m talking about the Bluesiana Rock Cafe, a considerably bigger crowd made the pilgrimage this time than for the sorry turnout at the gig by excellent guitar shredder Vinnie Moore (UFO), who played here on 06.10.2016.
Some eighty people were thrilled this time to welcome one of the most interesting and most distinctive standard-bearers of true-blue jazz-rock fusion, tuned to the six-string doctrine inherited from the days of the great pioneers like Weather Report and/or Return to Forever.
Scott Henderson is a man who has developed his exceptional talent, feel and intuition for guitar playing over a career into such stature that demand for his services has understandably skyrocketed. Besides working within his own band Tribal Tech, he has, for instance, put out three albums with Zawinul Syndicate, and played on albums by Chick Corea, Jeff Berlin, Jean-Luc Ponty, Billy Childs, Virgil Donati, Dennis Chambers, Gregg Bissonette and Carl Verheyen, and the list is nowhere near done. It even includes a collaboration on a solo album by Aki Rahimovski, as Scott contributed a solo to one of the tracks on the album »U vremenu Izgubljenih« (2007). By the way, Marco Mendoza guests on that album too, and how Aki landed both of them is something only Albert Einstein might know.
Among other things, Scott has five solo studio albums under his belt, and the latest of them, »Vibe Station«, came out last year. That’s the one he showcased more extensively on this new visit to Bluesiana. The trio of Scott Henderson (guitar), Romain Labaye (bass) and Archibald Ligonniere (drums) took the stage at around half past nine in the evening. Their arrival was greeted with general delight by the jazz-rock fusion gourmets, who pricked up their ears together tonight and surrendered to the trail of the famous guitarist’s boundless improvisations.
Henderson, in the company of two top-notch technicians of a much younger vintage, simply and in a single word, blew everyone away! In the opening bluesy, slow-cooked number, where he was still gently and tenderly warming up his fingers, his playing, which leaned on long improvised notes drenched in a howling sustain effect, even sounded comparable to Jeff Beck, and Henderson instantly built an incredible bridge between contrasting leaps of sensual softness and rawness and bite, which of course added that pleasing touch of rock’n’roll swagger. The band split the show into two parts with a solid half-hour break in between, which came in very handy for cooling down the mechanoreceptors. Each half of the concert ran an hour, so Henderson played two hours in total. The first half also impressed with an extremely fun and mischievous version of the Weather Report classic Black Market, where Henderson, as expected, took on all of Zawinul’s and Shorter’s lines and entertained the crowd wholeheartedly with boundless outbursts of improvisational escalation on his six-string wonder. In that number, Archibald and Romain got room for solos too. The incredible multi-layered technical, genre and cross-genre polish of Henderson, as well as of his two sidekicks, didn’t let those present breathe for even a moment. There was no shortage of unpredictable turns, often pulled off completely spontaneously. There was even more solo weaving in the second half of the concert in particular; at moments the whole performance felt almost overloaded with torn-loose jazzing, which for the most part still caught itself before the point of extreme excess, but toward the end escaped anyway into the bosom of free jazz.
Henderson once again poured himself out to the audience at this show. He left his heart and soul on the stage. In his utterly devoted, full-blooded, intuitive, instinctively raw performance, he snapped the thinnest string on the guitar and then replaced it himself. He didn’t have a spare guitar at hand. At the same time, one of the effects was acting up through the show, which set off unwanted noise in the amp, but the trio just had to live with it.
Among other things, the band played All Blues, then two newer tracks, Church of Xotic Dance and Vibe Station (both from the album »Vibe Station«), followed by Actual Proof and Mysterious Traveler. Henderson kept us thrilled to the end with his sincerity and uniqueness. Fans of the true school of titans of the jazz-rock universe, in which the name Scott Henderson rules in capital letters, got their money’s worth like they haven’t in a long time. An evening of bravura and unique interpretation of guitar playing, enriched with an incredible sense of damn good rhythmic kinetics. Henderson is a man who delivers a show that turns on a dime. He’s the kind of performer you can never get tired of at concerts. An extraordinary show at Bluesiana, and I hope a new opportunity to enjoy a gig with this exceptional guitar wizard comes up as soon as possible. Hands in the right place at the right moment, all the way through.
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