Ben Harper and The Innocent Criminals Leave Palmanova Spellbound with a Masterful Performance (2022)
Location: Palmanova / Piazza Grande / Italy
Date: Tuesday, 2 August 2022
Early August 2022, and Ben Harper is coming to Palmanova — just two weeks after dropping his fifteenth studio album, Bloodline Maintenance, with his loyal The Innocent Criminals bandmates in tow. You don’t miss this. The hugely respected American singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist — philanthropic activist and champion of the rights of the poor who, given everything he’s achieved, hardly needs an in-depth introduction — has long been celebrated for an extraordinarily vivid and fluid, multi-layered engagement with genre diversity. In fact, it’s precisely in the leaps you can trace across his studio output that Harper is a phenomenon unto himself, somehow winning the listener over again and again. That same expressive wit and spark, combined with impeccable maturity, runs through the latest album, Blood Maintenance, which has brought Ben back to the old continent once more.
The opening minutes belonged to the local folk rock outfit Il Mure Del Canto from Rome. In a solid half hour, the sextet made clear they’re a tightly drilled band with serious road miles under their belt and plenty of experience to show for it. In their twelve-year career the band has released five albums, the most recent of them, Maestrale, out this very year. That fusion of Mediterranean melody and rock rhetoric could, in some roundabout way, keep fans of Slovenia’s own Orleki perfectly entertained. A very enjoyable warm-up act.
By the time Ben Harper was about to take the stage, the venue had filled to the very last corner — seats taken everywhere, as far as the eye could see. A fantastic turnout. Ben Harper opened the concert with his crew delivering an a cappella take on the new Below Sea Level, hinting right from the off that we were in for an evening of flawless performance and sonic perfection. Beyond his brilliant vocal display and the expected guitar work, Harper also devoted a generous chunk of the show to demonstrating his mastery of the pedal steel guitar. With his endlessly fascinating voice and the vocal approach that so effortlessly bewitches a crowd, he leaned with casual ease on the generous support of his supremely tight The Innocent Criminals lineup: percussionist Leon Mobley, drummer Oliver Charles, keyboardist Chris Joyner, guitarist Alex Painter, and bassist Darwin Johnson.
After the brief a cappella intro the band quickly fell into their standard positions. Harper strapped on the Gibson, and the concert immediately got a boost of energy with a rocking take on Burn To Shine. Harper put his vocal chameleon act on full display for the first time with a heartfelt and achingly expressive Don’t Give Up On Me Now, where he was absolutely front and center, while Jah Work that followed, underpinned by an Afro-tinged melody, redistributed the expressive weight across the entire sextet. On the subject of world music woven into Harper’s set, a particular highlight came with the playful hit Steal My Kisses — percussionist Mobley dropped down onto a cajón, and the song flowed seamlessly and without pause into the brand-new Need To Know Basis, built on the very same rhythmic foundation.
After a stretch of extended lap steel playing — during which the band essentially built a full jam right there onstage — and a delicate instrumental interlude from Ben Harper on acoustic guitar, the venue came alive again with the long-awaited Diamonds On The Inside, which gradually signalled that the concert was tipping into its final stretch. The band’s extraordinary rhythmic firepower was confirmed by a brilliant reading of How Dark Is Gone, which sailed flawlessly on twin percussion and the organic warmth of those supremely musical basslines. A punch that’s second to none. And over all of it presided the incredible Harper with his voice, which at any given moment reaches the most hidden depths of anyone’s soul. What would Harper be without reggae, after all? The crowd had been itching for those moves from Ben and the band all evening, and when they kicked into Finding Our Way, the place went completely off the rails. But Amen Omen, delivered with exquisite execution at the very peak of the finale, spun the mood dizzily back toward melancholy and longing. No question about it — if anyone can pull that off, it’s Ben Harper, whose velvet voice, so incredibly rich in colour, plays with the crowd like a chameleon and stirs up genuine emotions and passions within them. In that regard, no other artist comes close.
That there were quite a few die-hard Ben Harper fans in the crowd was hardly surprising. They couldn’t keep still throughout the entire concert, but when the band launched into Finding Our Way, part of the audience simply moved as close to the stage as possible, abandoning their seats and filling every available aisle standing up. The crowd started dancing freely and singing along with the lyrics. The obligatory encore opened with the sprightly, harmonica-driven When She Believes, followed by the preacher-style new track It Ain’t No Use, while Fly One Time, with its alt-rock edge, flipped the atmosphere once more and primed the runway for a phenomenal, unforgettable final crescendo with With My Own Two Hands. One more reggae moment — the one everyone had been feverishly waiting for. A closing reggae celebration that just didn’t want to end. For the finale, Harper hypnotized the crowd one last time and carried them off into his musical world.
The show delivered exactly what we came for. Harper left his soul on that stage, and the performance — the entire band’s delivery included — belongs in the highest tier of concert experiences. Sound and tightness at the very highest level. A concert where you don’t catch a single slip. Ben Harper and The Innocent Criminals cast their spell on the audience that evening with effortless ease, and the two concert hours flew by as if they’d never existed. That’s how that ‘hypnosis’ works — that state of total absorption. That bridge between audience and artist that only the very best can build so flawlessly and convincingly. After his statement performance in Palmanova, Ben Harper is definitively one of those magicians.
Authors: Aleš Podbrežnik & Edita Klemen
Photography: Aleš Podbrežnik
Setlist:
1. Below Sea Level
2. Burn To Shine
3. Don’t Give Up On Me Now
4. Jah Work
5. Will To Live
6. Steal My Kisses / Need To Know Basis
7. Burn One Down
8. We Need To Talk About It
9. Faded / The Ocean
10. Solo Lap Steel
11. Solo acoustic guitar
12. Diamonds On The Inside
13. How Dark Is Gone
14. Finding Our Way
15. Amen Omen
—encore—
16. When She Believes
17. It Ain’t No Use
18. Fly One Time
19. With My Own Two Hands
