Location: San Dona Di Piave (Treviso) / Revolver klub / Italy
Date: Sunday, October 23, 2016
Stu Hamm and Greg Howe are two out-of-this-world musicians who need no big introduction. They once toured Europe together, when they brought a third top-class player into their trio, drummer Dennis Chambers. This time, for their new and no less spectacular celebration of cross-genre fusion, firmly leaning on jazz rhetoric, the old buddies brought in Hungarian drummer Zoltan Csorsz, who once lent his drumming mastery to the Swedish progressive rock revivalists The Flower Kings.
In 2015 Stu Hamm released his new album “The Book of Lies”, which is also what the tour was called, as the highly virtuosic trio, officially billed as Stu Hamm Band feat. Greg Howe, hit European club stages. The third Italian show of the tour overall was announced at a great club called Revolver, located in the industrial zone of San Dona Di Piave, a town near the larger city of Treviso. That means it’s an easy late-afternoon drive from Ljubljana, a good two hours (two and a half with a stop on the way).
Revolver Club is a venue that boasts excellent acoustics, great stage lighting that guarantees a colorful, lively play of countless spotlights, and top-notch gear for the main PA too. The stage is also high, and even though the club space is relatively small and holds 500 guests at most, the height of the stage makes it feel like you’re at a big concert in a much larger venue.
Anyway, the opening act of the evening went to the locals. That’s the interesting Italian duo Dolcetti, made up of Gianni Rojatti on guitar and synths and drummer Erik Tulissio. Worth mentioning that the same duo also opened for Steve Vai on July 7, 2016, in Udine, Italy, so they’ve already had some serious exposure in front of Italian music crowds. They played an entirely instrumental set of original material, 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. From the pickups to the guitars, the effects, the amps. That carries over into his approach to the solos woven into the main motifs of the songs, as well as the duo’s overall melodic sense. On top of all that, Rojatti adds, here and there, curtains of eighties synth washes. The performance comes with extra sonic layers and additional rhythms produced by a drum machine. So the electric guitar sound often melts into synthesized techno elements, which takes a really strong stomach, since those two elements don’t mix easily. Through all of this, Tulissio on drums came off as more or less a bystander. Basically, the duo is interesting strictly and primarily for the virtuoso acrobatics Gianni Rojatti pulls off on guitar.
The moment the guys said goodbye, an American musician originally from Washington D.C. was already on stage: Jeff Aug. He’s accompanying Stu Hamm Band on the whole European tour. In a good half hour he served up a complete acoustic guitar experience, with Jeff standing out for his distinctive fingerstyle technique. Jeff Aug is first and foremost an excellent guitarist. He’s a seasoned, experienced player who’s constantly on the road. Over his career he’s opened for respected acts like Allan Holdsworth, Soft Machine, Johnny A. and Albert Lee, among others. He also holds a record of his own, and no, 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 World Records certificate in March 2012. Jeff, who has lived in Europe since 1998, more precisely on the edge of the Alpine peaks of southern Germany, started his career back in the nineties in the bands Floating Stone and Sorry About Your Daughter. With the latter he put out two studio albums, and at the same time he started recording his own original material, which yielded three solo studio albums, also still in the nineties. The fourth, “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 he plays his own material from it on this tour too, in a strictly acoustic manner. In a short but extremely intense 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 wild with free-flowing, unbridled dexterity, breezing through technically demanding stretches between the main motifs and the solo embellishments. His idiom blends elements of world music, neo-classicism, country and funk, while his rock background shows too, as with his right-hand “digging in” he happily throws himself at the thickest strings of the guitar more than once. 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 with a wild tempo-setting that colors the expressive range of the songs. At several points in the set he strung together the songs Listen Up, Jazzhole!, Fuck the Neighbours and Lightness, which closed out an exceptional show. It’s incredible what one man can do on stage when an acoustic guitar is literally grown onto him. Jeff Aug is a concert attraction all of his own.
At last, the “fantastikus” trio arrived. Even though the name up front is Stu Hamm Band, it was actually Howe’s guitar that, throughout the show, gently took over the central, focal spot in how the concert developed. Greg and Stu naturally kept trading solo spots all along, and their chemistry (planned by the totally natural mutual feel of the two players, well tested in the past, when Chambers kept them company on drums) kept walking an outstanding middle path along the seeming line between escalating experimentation and holding on to musical restraint, compactness and appeal. In the opening stretch Howe got plenty of the spotlight, but somewhere in the middle Stu Hamm slowly started to take over the attention, especially once he began showing off his famous tapping figures, of which he remains one of the main protagonists in the new millennium too. So the trio tackled an outstanding rendition of The Beatles classic Lucy in the Sky wtih Diamonds, which can be found in its original version on Hamm’s solo album “The Book of Lies” (2015). In similar figures, that number was followed by a take on the Led Zeppelin classic Going to California, without which no Stu Hamm concert goes by. Among other times, we got to hear that song live back in March 2008, when the famous bassist gave a clinic at Orto bar in Ljubljana. The band also gave more room to Greg Howe’s original pieces, and the master of genre fusion and many-sided guitar virtuoso played his own Proto Cosmos and The Pepper Shake, among others. As expected, the band put more focus on Stuart Hamm’s new album, with the title track and Terminal Beach ringing out from it. After an hour and a half, the band closed this phantasmagorical show with Eric Johnson’s Lone Star and came back for the obligatory encore with The Obligatory Boogie.
It’s definitely worth highlighting the contribution of drummer Zoltan Csorsz, whose top-class performance was full of polished, finely tuned charisma and drumming bravura. Because of the constant improvisational barrage between Hamm and Howe, at first glance, “listening casually”, he might have seemed a bit lost in the background. But especially in the second half, when Hamm let him loose for a drum solo, he showed off outstanding qualities, with an incredible combination of cannon-like figures that would detonate superbly in rock music and jazzy polish. Csorsz is basically a jazz drummer, and with a whole pleiad of extremely fast bursts of strokes in the transitions he further proved he’s a drummer who can play anything and can 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 among all three players, which justifies their guest spots on albums by pop artists too, to a whole slew of improvisational figures that carried us to the edge of spontaneous happenings. Top-notch, eye-catching, wholehearted, and played with incredible delight and a hefty dose of full-blooded fun. Throughout, the show also came with just the right amount of cheekiness and dark humor, which Hamm used to talk to the crowd and keep them entertained. Another unforgettable concert adventure from a team-up of three exceptional musicians, woven into a one-of-a-kind live climax. A concert night that leaves you inwardly fulfilled, simply stunned, and all words become superfluous.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
