Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Venue: Castello Di San Giusto / Trieste (Trst) / Italy
Concert date: 06.08.2011
Attendance: 800
Ticket price: 0.00€ (free admission!)
Steve Lukather is a name that no longer needs a detailed introduction. He’s a part of all of us, one way or another. The common denominator that ties us to him is at the very least the Toto classic and undeniably timeless evergreen Africa. Steve Lukather is a man who can play anything on guitar. Over his career he has contributed, one way or another, to more than 1500 studio albums. But what defines him most, of course, is the face and the work of Toto.
Steve belongs to that league of a few guitar aces you can drop into any musical situation, hand them the most puzzling musical riddle you can think of, and these masters will untangle it with feather-light ease. Then there are Steve’s contemporaries, who blaze a similar career trail yet come from a completely different approach to playing guitar, like Michael Landau and/or Carl Verheyen.
Steve Lukather is in full working swing. Within two years he has put out two solo studio albums, the latest of them, titled “All’s Well That Ends Well” – RockLine review HERE, last year. He backed both with tours, Europe included. Add to that the gigs with the Toto “The Seventh One” lineup, reactivated last year and this year for a few summer shows, and a musician’s schedule gets extremely packed.
Steve did the first leg of the “All’s Well That Ends Well” tour across the old continent in November 2010, the second leg followed this March and April, and the Trieste show was part of a run of his solo concerts that make up the third leg of that same promo tour. What’s more, the Trieste gig was Lukather’s very last show, the one with which he said goodbye to the old continent for a while. For Trieste, “Luke” kept the concert repertoire very similar to the one a few of us lucky ones got to hear on 04.03.2011 at Graz’s Orpheum hall.
This year’s rock-flavored summer in Trieste moved from Piazza Unita d’Italia to the idyllic Castello Di San Giusto. At the turn of July into August, three nights in a row put on stage, among others, the traditional prog rock concerts that the local promoter organizes every year.
It’s about a quarter past nine in the evening. The spacious castle courtyard is dotted with some 1000 seats, and in front of them stands a roomy stage, the kind Steve doesn’t usually get to see every day on his solo shows. The maestro kicked off his evening by staying hidden behind a curtain a little longer, while the three-piece backing crew had already taken the stage: the lovely dark-skinned gazelle Renne Jones (bass), cap-wearing Steve Weingart (keyboards) and “Mr. Chocolate”, the target of Luke’s Nutella-product plugging, Eric Valentine (drums). After about half a minute of the intro to Darkness In My World, a new song from the new album, the esteemed guitar wizard finally strides into the middle of the spotlight beams, and the crowd greets him with thunderous ovations. The band instantly builds an atmospheric yet dramatic backdrop that gives the song a character that could easily have landed on a Toto album like “Falling In Between” (2006). Over the first five songs Luke strolled through his solo discography and lined up a layered musical craftsmanship that’s hard to match. Alongside him, the seasoned backing instrumentalists shone with remarkable flexibility in genre-“bending”. A well-oiled machine that can’t fail. Lukather crowned his cheerful mood with a line that quickly “bought” the crowd: “Tonight we’re going to play the best of our best concerts! Because it’s the last show of our tour!”
Hendrix is Luke’s eternal inspiration. This time he paid tribute to the late guitar pioneer twice. In the first half of the show, when he cut loose with Up From The Skies! In the second half that was followed by an instrumental version of Hendrix’s Little Wing, where Lukather, drawing on his rich arsenal, laid out gorgeous collages of tonal shifts shaped like arabesques in an extended take on the classic, especially in the second part. The guitarist once again cast his spell with that exceptional, magical control his hands have when they get to interact with a guitar. With elemental force, flexibility, witty insight and that much-needed pinch of spontaneity and unpredictability, with which he always so directly and boldly enchants every music gourmet. Luke is frighteningly accomplished in his expressive greatness, which comes down above all to his power of boundlessly merging improvisational ability with a sense for melodic accessibility! Luke can be immensely fragile, almost vulnerable in the sophisticated passages, and the next moment he explosively breaks away! Lukather’s touch of lucidity and his poking fun at himself, as well as the wisecracks about the members of the backing crew, come with a healthy helping of tasteful humor, with which he instantly tears down the apparent barrier between audience and band. But in all his stage “service”, Luke never once serves up pretentiousness or tries to force his presence on the masses in the sense of fishing for “worship me, I’m the best” kind of feedback.
A man of seemingly modest bearing, open to the audience throughout, he bowed to his late Toto colleague Jeffrey Porcaro in the expected Song For Jeff, and especially conjured up the scene of 800 heads in a hypnotic drift during the performance of Harrison’s Beatles song While My Guitar Gently Weeps, where the whole congregation joined him in the chorus. Then there’s Luke’s Tears Of My Own Shame, where the man is in no way ashamed of his inspiration from Jimi Hendrix. A great song, a striking riff, and the magic of the quartet is exceptional. Perception, communication, chemistry… The cherry on top of this repertoire was the new instrumental jam called Tumescent, which broadly summed up the whole vision of the mission of this exceptional musician’s artistic brilliance.
Luke made use of the audience’s support by turning them into a fifth member of the backing crew, since the crowd’s participation proved a welcome vocal filler and a cooling-off for Luke’s worn vocal cords. Before Tears Of My Own Shame too, he urged the audience to help him with the “Oh-oh” chant in the chorus. Tears Of My Own Shame (his Hendrix-inspired “equivalent” for 2010 can be found in the song Brodies – played in the first part of the show) flowed masterfully and completely spontaneously into the already-described fascinating Hendrix instrumental Little Wing, which of course is dictated by the kinship in the structure of both songs. Jimi Hendrix himself should have been in the audience for this treat.
The concert closed with two punchy and, above all, catchy rockers from the new album, Can’t Look Back and, in the first encore, Flash In The Pan, with which Luke drew the audience right up to the stage. The crowd’s behavior was downright funny. At least in the front rows by the stage. Earlier the crowd had been filming their videos on amateur cell phone recorders from a distance, and now they did it from right under the stage. Italians just see things their own way. Likewise, this time photographers got free access for the entire concert. Photographers of all sorts. You could shoot as much as you wanted and could. Anyone who wanted to could take pictures. With flash (two, three?), or without. All this (unnecessary) busyness of burdening oneself with artificial “extensions” of the human receptor organs during a concert, which in no way fits the manner of surrendering to the magic of music (But watch out! These are already “old-fashioned” views today!), somewhat spoiled the atmosphere of the show and, in the final tally, came across as disrespectful toward the quartet too.
Luke came on stage one last time. Strapped with an acoustic guitar. For two years now he’s been closing his shows with the Toto “Tambu” classic called The Road Goes On. In his address too, he explained to the enthusiastic audience that they’d have no trouble recognizing the next song. And lo and behold. It was NOT The Road Goes On, but the “Fahrenheit” hit I’ll Be Over You. After the opening verse the guitarist stepped right to the edge of the stage, in front of the monitors, and left the singing of the hit to the audience, who did their job with flying colors.
An hour and three quarters of pure magic. The quartet in great spirits, relaxed even though Luke showed visible signs of exhaustion here and there during the show, since he’s got loads of gigging across different continents of the planet behind him, and he hasn’t fully wrapped up this year’s concerts yet either. With his performance, Luke once again fascinated in every way. It just doesn’t go any other way with him. His impeccable musical expertise was once again turned into something unique and unrepeatable. Above all in the sense of adding a spontaneous touch of improvisation, which means just one thing. All of you who happened to be at a show for the first, second or tenth time heard completely new, not-yet-played versions of Luke’s standards!
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Setlist
1. Darkness In My World 2. Always Be There for Me 3. Extinction Blues 4. Stab in the Back 5. Brody’s 6. Up from the Skies 7. Band jam 8. Song for Jeff 9. Tumescent 10. Eric Valentine drum solo 11. While my Guitar Gently Weeps 12. Tears Of My Own Shame 13. Little Wing 14. Can’t Look Back —encore I.— 15. Flash In The Pan —encore II.— 16. I’ll Be Over You
Photo gallery
