Author: Urban Bolta
Location: Orpheum / Graz / Austria
Concert date: 02/20/2014
Attendance: 500
Ticket price: €38 – €50
Years ago, Graz’s Orpheum used to line up one tempting, sweet gig after another across every possible subgenre of rock, but in recent years, at least around my corner of the scene, there hasn’t been much going on there. After a near four-year lull, which is how long it’s been since the Nazareth show at Orpheum, the Rockline crew once again hit the road to Austrian Styria, off to a fresh little concert happening.
The one luring us into downtown Graz was none other than John Mayall. Who would have thought that a gentleman of the venerable age of eighty would roll up this close to us once more this spring? Even though he shocked everybody at the end of the last decade by disbanding his longtime backing group The Bluesbreakers and carrying on his career unburdened, under his own name alone, the godfather of British blues keeps right on touring. Mostly in North America, where he’s lived since the late sixties despite his British passport, but after several years the grand old man of music has headed back into the very heart of continental Europe too.
John Mayall has put together a new backing crew, made up since the Bluesbreakers split of guitarist Rocky Athas (Rocky Athas Band, Black Oak Arkansas…) and a Chicago rhythm section with bassist Greg Rzab (Otis Rush, Buddy Guy, Gov’t Mule, The Black Crowes…) and drummer Jay Davenport (Junior Wells, Pinetop Perkins, Melvin Taylor…). We’re talking about seriously awe-inspiring heavyweights here, who can go toe to toe, no shame at all, with any of Mayall’s past sidemen, with Eric Clapton and Peter Green leading the pack.
In the hours before the show even started, John Mayall was already proving that despite his age he’s still vital, almost bouncy! He had no trouble clambering in behind the merch counter in the lobby, where, before the high point of the evening, he sold albums with his own hands and posed for photos with fans with a mischievous grin. He carried that good mood onto the stage too, when a few minutes past eight in the evening he kicked off the night with Otis Rush’s All Your Love, a song bassist Rzab played on for a while in the late eighties.
If a lot of trips to see this or that music legend are about “ticking things off your list,” John Mayall’s show was way more than that, since with his agility and enviable physical shape the man leaves plenty of musicians a decade, or even two decades, younger in the dust! Setting the tone for the evening, the opener served up a playful tale of Texas-sounding blues that, with its lively blues-rock attitude, was a departure from Mayall’s classic, traditional style. Mayall had already started flirting with a rougher vocabulary on his previous album “Tough” (2009), and he put it to use here and there at the Graz show as well. During Congo Square, Mayall lost his patience for a few moments over the clearly bad sound coming from the monitors, and with no keyboards and the boss grumbling, not even the instrumental trio of sidemen could save things with improvisation.
Even though Mayall held back on stirring up a sense of unpredictability, he carefully maintained a balance of intensity and sensitivity throughout the show. The bouncy blues standard Parchman Farm from his early days, during which part of the crowd unconsciously started tapping their feet on their neighbors’ shoes, he soon calmed down with the lighter but no less intense and heartfelt Early In The Morming. Though vocally not as sharp as he once was, he got plenty of thunderous applause over the evening, especially for juggling harmonica and keyboards at the same time, all without any disastrous rhythmic slip-ups! It was precisely this childlike ease on the harmonica, whose sound summoned the spirit of blues harmonica founding father Sonny Boy Williamson into Orpheum, that strung the concert’s high points together one after another, before the second half made room for the brand-new album “A Special Life”, due out in March, with the songs Like A Fool and Heartache. In the closing stretch Mayall started handing out more and more scraps of the spotlight to the men beside him on stage, who one by one embellished the instrumental passages with their own artistic flourishes, and only then did the sold-out auditorium start to realize what an extraordinary contribution the rest of the trio was making, as they took us, along with the gray-haired old-timer in the middle, straight to blues heaven!
An evening with one of the last surviving fossils of the traditional British blues school lived up to every expectation. The man is simply a master of his craft, and even at eighty he’s still having the time of his life doing what he’s devoted his whole life to: playing the blues!
Setlist
1. All Your Love
2. Congo Square
3. Gimme One More Day
4. Somebody’s Acting Like A Child
5. Parchman Farm
6. Early In The Morning
7. Like A Fool
8. Heartache
9. So Many Roads
10. Talk To Your Daughter
11. Mail Order Mystics
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12. Room to Move
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