Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: San Dona DI Piave / Revolver Club / Italy
Concert date: October 23, 2016
Attendance: 100
Ticket price: €20.00
Stu Hamm and Greg Howe are two out-of-this-world musicians who need no big introduction. They’ve toured Europe together before, back when they brought a third top-tier player into the trio, drummer Dennis Chambers. This time the old buddies invited Hungarian drummer Zoltan Csorzs into the band for their new and no less spectacular take on cross-genre fusion, firmly anchored in jazz rhetoric. Csorzs, for his part, once lent his drumming mastery to Swedish progressive rock revivalists The Flower Kings.
In 2015 Stu Hamm released a new album, »The Book of Lies«, which is also what the tour was called, and the highly virtuosic trio, officially billed as Stu Hamm Band feat. Greg Howe, set off for European club stages. The third Italian show of the tour was booked at a great club called Revolver, tucked away in the industrial zone of San Dona Di Piave, near the larger city of Treviso. From Ljubljana that’s an easy late-afternoon drive of a good two hours (two and a half if you stop on the way).
Revolver Club is a venue that can brag about excellent acoustics and top-notch stage lighting, guaranteeing a colorful, dynamic play of countless spotlights, plus first-rate main PA gear. The stage is high, too, and even though the club room is relatively small and holds 500 people at most, the height of the stage makes it feel like a big concert in a much larger venue.
The opening act of the night went to the locals: the intriguing Italian duo Dolcetti, made up of Gianni Rojatti on guitar and synthesizers and drummer Erik Tulissio. I should mention that the same duo also opened the Steve Vai show on July 7, 2016, in Udine, Italy, so they’ve already had some serious exposure in front of Italian music crowds. They played entirely instrumental material, original compositions of course. Rojatti is obsessed with Steve Vai from head to toe, and you can tell from the identical sound his guitar »gear« goes for: the pickups, the guitars, the effects, the amps. That carries over to how he approaches soloing, which is woven into the main themes of the songs, as well as to the duo’s overall melodic sensibility. On top of all that, Rojatti occasionally drapes the sound in curtains of eighties synthesizers. The set was backed by extra sonic layers and additional rhythms produced by a drum machine. More than once the electric guitar sound melted into synthesized techno elements, and for that you need a really strong stomach, because those two ingredients don’t mix easily. Through all of it, Tulissio on drums came off as more or less an extra. Basically, the duo is interesting strictly and primarily because of the virtuoso acrobatics Gianni Rojatti pulls off on guitar.
The moment the two lads said goodbye, the American musician originally from Washington D.C., Jeff Aug, was already standing on stage. He accompanies Stu Hamm Band on their entire European tour. In a good half hour he served up a complete acoustic guitar experience, with Jeff standing out for his distinctive »fingerstyle« approach to the instrument. Jeff Aug is first and foremost a superb guitarist. He’s a seasoned, experienced musician who is constantly on the road. Over his career he’s opened for esteemed acts such as Allan Holdsworth, Soft Machine, Johnny A. and Albert Lee, among others. He also holds a rather singular record, and that’s no lie: in a single day he played nine different shows in nine different countries (Luxembourg, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Liechtenstein, Austria, France, Italy and Switzerland), for which he received a Guinness Book of Records certificate in March 2012. Jeff, who has lived in Europe since 1998, on the edge of the Alpine peaks of southern Germany to be precise, started his career in the nineties in the bands Floating Stone and Sorry About Your Daughter. He released two studio albums with the latter, and at the same time began recording his own original material, which yielded three solo studio albums, also still in the nineties. The fourth, titled »Living Room Sessions«, came out in 2009, and the latest, »Wedding Song«, in 2012. This year Jeff also released a live album called »Live in Europe«, and on this tour he plays his original material from it, delivered in a strictly acoustic manner. In a short but extremely thorough and expressively rich set, Jeff showed an incredible knack for setting the tempo and picking the strings with his right hand at the same time, while his left hand went freewheeling through unbridled technical wizardry, playfully conquering tricky stretches between the main motifs and the solo embellishments. His vocabulary blends elements of world music, neo-classicism, country and funk, and he also shows off his rock background, since with a bit of right-hand »digging« he gladly launches himself at the thickest strings of the guitar. It would be interesting to ask him how the “grunge” phenomenon shaped his musical style. The switches from intuitive, almost meditative flirting with the instrument are contrasted with escalations of runaway decibels and groove coming off the strings and a wild, driving tempo that colors the expressive reach of the songs. Over the course of the set the man also strung together songs like Listen Up, Jazzhole!, Fuck the Neighbours and Lightness, which closed out an exceptional show. It’s incredible what just one person can do on stage when an acoustic guitar is literally grown onto him. Jeff Aug is a concert attraction all his own.
Finally the moment came for the trio »fantastikus«. Even though the name up front is Stu Hamm Band, it was actually Howe’s guitar that gently took over the central, focal position in the flow of the show. Greg and Stu naturally kept passing solo spots back and forth, and their chemistry (born of a completely natural mutual feel between the two musicians, thoroughly road-tested in the past when Chambers kept them company on drums) kept walking an incredible middle path along a seeming line between escalating experimentation and holding on to musical restraint, compactness and appeal. Howe got plenty of exposure early on, but somewhere in the middle Stu Hamm slowly started to take over the spotlight, especially once he launched into the famous tapping figures, of which he remains one of the main protagonists even in the new millennium. The trio then tackled an outstanding cover of the Beatles classic Lucy in the Sky wtih Diamonds, which you can find in its original version on Hamm’s solo album »The Book of Lies« (2015). That number was followed, in similar figures, by a cover of the Led Zeppelin classic Going to California, without which no Stu Hamm show ever passes. We actually heard that song live back in March 2008, when the famous bassist gave a clinic at Ljubljana’s Orto bar. The band also gave plenty of room to Greg Howe’s original work, and the master of genre fusion and multilayered guitar craftsman played his own Proto Cosmos and The Pepper Shake, among others. As expected, the band put more focus on Stuart Hamm’s new album, from which both the title track and Terminal Beach rang out. After an hour and a half they closed this fantasmagorical show with Eric Johnson’s Lone Star and came back for the obligatory encore with The Obligatory Boogie.
Zoltan Csorzs deserves a special shout-out too, for his drumming bravura and the polished, well-tuned charisma of a top-class performance. Admittedly, with the constant improvisational machine-gun fire flying between Hamm and Howe, he came across at first listen as a bit lost in the background, but especially in the second half, when Hamm gave him room for a drum feature, he showed off outstanding chops, with an incredible combination of cannon-like figures that would detonate superbly in rock music and a jazz-honed polish. Csorzs is at his core a jazz drummer, and with a whole pleiad of extremely fast fills on the transitions he further confirmed that he’s a drummer who can play anything and play anywhere.
That night Stu Hamm Band delivered an incredible show of multi-genre fusion. From the metal-tinged escapades of Greg’s shredding to the finesse of the interplay between all three players, which justifies guest spots even on pop artists’ albums, and a whole pleiad of improvisational figures that carried us to the edge of spontaneous development. Superb, attractive, committed and played with incredible joy and a measure of full-blooded fun. Throughout, the show was also seasoned with just the right dose of cheekiness and black humor, which Hamm used to address and entertain the crowd. Another unforgettable concert adventure from a union of three exceptional musicians, woven into a climax all its own. An evening that leaves you inwardly fulfilled, simply stunned, with all words becoming redundant.
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