Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Piazza Unita / Tarvisio (Tarvisio) / Italy
Concert date: 07/28/2011
Attendance: 2,500
Ticket price: €40.00 / €46.00
Ben Harper is an American singer and musician who cultivates an eclectic blend of rock messaging, in which collages of folk, blues, funk, pop and soul all melt into one another. Whatever Harper takes on in terms of arrangement and vocal interpretation comes across as hugely convincing, thanks to the singular way he structures his songs and the specifics of his chameleonic vocal delivery. Add to that his unique yet many-sided slide guitar style, which owes most of its stance to the black blues of the Mississippi Delta, and the musical picture of Ben Harper is roughly carved out. The sound that Ben cultivates on his albums also owes something to jangle-pop cues, while Harper’s logo with its British cockade hints at a flirtation with the mod movement. In modern terms, you could squeeze Harper into a unique version of alternative rock, dosed with shades of all the genres listed above. That vocal chameleonism lets Harper be 100% convincing whenever he tackles any genre. Wherever you put his voice, it always sits right in the music.
This year Ben Harper released a new studio album called “Give Till It’s Gone”. It brought him to the European end of the map as part of a new concert tour, with dates booked exclusively in France, Switzerland and Italy. That choice can be tied to the sales success of his new and past albums in those three countries, and consequently to the strongest base of European fans, raised in exactly these three European countries.
Ben Harper roams the stages with two backing crews. The first is The Innocent Criminals, the second Relentless 7. The new album is especially devoted to intimacy and a personal tone, since Harper left a difficult marriage behind. So it felt most fitting to him to hit the road this time simply as “Ben Harper” and not as “Ben Harper & Relentless 7”, even though the whole Relentless 7 crew is accompanying him on the current tour. Which only makes sense, since they played the rest of the instruments on the new album too.
The first surprise was the turnout at the town square in Tarvisio, which really confirmed just how hugely popular this musician is in Italy. People were packed into the square like matches in a box, and some folks even unfurled banners. The weather had been threatening rain all day, which this July, sadly, keeps dumping in abundance, but during the show only a few innocent drops fell from the sky, and it didn’t spoil the concert fun one bit.
Before Ben Harper, Ben’s friend and singer-songwriter Tom Freund took ten minutes to warm up the crowd. Acoustic guitar in hand, he strummed and sang three little tunes, and for the fourth he was joined on stage by Ben Harper himself on slide guitar, and the square instantly boiled over at his arrival. Freund didn’t leave much of an impression about how far his musical expression reaches. In ten minutes that’s really hard to do, which raises the question of whether it even makes sense to have Freund open the evening for Harper.
Ben Harper hit the stage with his quartet at 9:50 p.m. The crowd rose, the audience went wild, the guys on stage even exchanged glances for a few moments, finally agreed on the plan, and the excellent new song Don’t Give Up On Me Now rang out. In the regular set, which ran surprisingly short at just an hour and twenty minutes, Harper came across as an exceptionally sensitive musical character who handles every move with ease. His voice can be completely gentle, without a trace of pretension, with a subtle, modest dosing of soul improvisation, yet it keeps that sensual glow throughout, which makes his verses literally come alive on stage with emotion. And pins the listener firmly to the spot. In the evening’s rare (pure) blues number Where Could I Go, Harper showed how mighty, rough and utterly unbreakable his voice can become on stage. In this moment of soul thunder the man pulls a special trick: he leaves his microphone behind, steps to the edge of the stage and delivers a few verses of the song “a cappella”, while Relentless 7 hush their accompaniment to barely audible levels. That moment really fired up the crowd, which just wouldn’t stop with the ovations and the uproar. Harper’s vocal range is especially rich and enchanting, though, when he’s backed by the most delicate sounds. Particularly in the brand-new Masterpiece, then Diamonds On The Inside, and especially Fly One Time, played near the end of the regular set, a great mix of folk and modern U2-style rock, which the band, with Ben’s voice out front, masterfully built up toward an intense closing “crescendo” of vivid atmospheric seasoning.
In Lay There & Hate Me the band left some room for Jordan Richardson to let loose on drums in a short but thoroughly unoriginal solo spot, while the album “White Lies For Dark Times” got a seriously powerful reinterpretation in the blues march Number With No Name, where Harper again grabbed the slide guitar.
Harper dedicated the new Spilling Faith to his colleague, former Beatle Ringo Starr, while the evening’s special gem Pleasure And Pain was played only as a duet with Tom Freund. Freund is an old friend of Harper’s, and the two wrote the song together back in the eighties; it appears on Harper’s self-titled studio debut. A special part of Harper’s performance is, of course, his obligatory fifteen-minute instrumental solo spot on slide guitar. It presents in the best possible way the musician’s multifaceted definition of flexibility, comprehensibility and the vividness of a curious, experimenting character. Through the many shades of genre deviations in a number like this, Harper masterfully manages to keep a compact common thread running through it all.
In the first encore Harper came back on stage completely alone. Strapped into an acoustic guitar, he played Walk Away and Roses From My Friends all by himself, once again spellbinding the crowd with his delicate interpretation. Harper doesn’t use a pick when playing acoustic guitar. In Amen Omen the entire Relentless 7 crew joins him mid-song and the track gets its closing “electric” wings. But that’s not all. The band comes back for a second encore with the lucid Burn To Shine, while the evening with Ben Harper and Relentless 7 wraps up in a general folk-rock celebration of the square in Tarvisio with the song Better Way.
The enthusiasm is huge, the crowd euphoric, the band says goodnight. And yet! Harper keeps his buddies on stage. That especially throws the guitar tech, who had already started packing up the gear, but he quickly gets his bearings and sets a chair and slide guitar back up for Harper. The band launches into the Zeppelin classic No Quarter. The drawn-out instrumental jam in the middle caught guitarist “Moz” flat-footed, and he didn’t make a notable impression in the improvisation spot.
In the end the show clocked in at a solid two hours and 15 minutes. Of that, the three encores took up a whole 50 minutes. A magical evening of unique expression, generated by the genius of Ben Harper the person and the artist in Tarvisio, ranks among those concert adventures that give the audience the most. Harper is a performer who doesn’t skimp on emotion or spontaneity. Through the shifting moods, the soft, tender, more intimate side of the musician clearly comes through, and with its strong lyrical messaging it touches anyone at such a concert especially deeply.
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Setlist
01. Don’t Give Up On Me Now 02. Diamonds On The Inside 03. Masterpiece 04. She’s Only Happy In The Sun 05. Number With No Name 06. Rock N’ Roll Is Free 07. Lay There & Hate Me 08. Pleasure And Pain 09. Spilling Faith 10. Fly One Time 11. Where Could I Go —encore I.— 12. Walk Away 13. Roses From My Friends 14. Amen Omen —encore II.— 15. Burn To Shine 16. Better Way —encore III.— 17. No Quarter
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