Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Ljubljana / SiTi Teater / Slovenia
Concert date: 21.12.2012
Attendance: 120
Ticket price: €20.00
On the day the mountains were shaking and the world was supposedly ending, Maja Pihler Stermecki, better known to everyone as “Bilbi”, brought a ray of sunshine to the Slovenian capital with her show at SiTi Teater. A Christmas concert with a special kind of festive atmosphere. On the balcony, the choral sextet Druga harmonija; on stage next to Bilbi, a crew of excellent musicians, starting with keyboardist Davor Klarič, guitarist Peter Dekleva, bassist Luka Gaiser and drummer Urban Krč. So Bilbi leaves nothing to chance. With a backing crew like that, it’s really hard to miss the mark. Actually, you can’t. The right chemistry just has to kick in. And it does.
Like always! The usual schedule. Eight in the evening. On a Friday. Part of the »SiTi za dobro glasbo« series. So, the last concert of the year for SiTi Teater! A festively decorated stage. Full of helium balloons and twinkling lights. Among them, Bilbi toddles onto the stage in a bushy, white, curly wig, at first glance more like some Cindy Lauper-style extravagance than a Hebrew version of Pippi Longstocking. The concert was split into two parts. The first carried more solemnity, more intimacy, and a bit more restraint too. Here Bilbi could still totter around in high heels, because the second half of the show was coming, demanding even more energetic, hop-skip-and-jump playing, which meant the concert really opened up toward its closing stretch, but we’ll get there.
Bilbi saved the day with her excellent vocal form and an energetically driven interpretation that didn’t shut out the character-laden charge of the feverish, flirtatiously bubbling nature of that Styrian geographical saying. She really pulled it off. The goal was to cheer up a good hundred people and, for a moment, steer their minds away from the weight of everyday stuff, as she herself put it, in times that »aren’t nice out there«.
The repertoire covered the tracks from the debut »Drobne slike« (2011), including the songs Ko tvoja sem še bla, Iskrice, Tisto ni bil maj, (toward the end, a total must) Hvala za vijolice, Kaj pa ti, Če srce se vname, Nič me ni sram, Jokala bom jutri, 505 s črto, (almost dedicated to Klarič) Hipijska, Obljubi mi and the one »about shampooing the heart«, Drobne slike.
Bilbi has enormous mileage behind her and plenty of stage experience. At the start of most songs the backdrop was built by the superb Klarič and Dekleva, and when the solid rhythm section of the Krč-Gaiser pairing joined in, you got the real feeling of a little mini orchestra on stage, one whose balanced arrangement of building blocks offers an ideal backbone of musical support for Bilbi’s vocal character. In that respect we can say the songs went through a fair bit of necessary mini-surgical transformation. The horns were left out entirely, which freed up more room for Klarič and Dekleva to fill the space. Bilbi rounded out the picture by shaking a tambourine and the occasional »buzzing« into a kazoo. The songs’ styling gained even more elements of organically felt warmth, deepening the genre macramé of R&B, soul, blues and even gospel cues in the otherwise pop-friendly story of Bilbi. And we mustn’t forget the addition of the choral sextet, which blended superbly with the authority of Bilbi’s vocal performance.
Bilbi masterfully dosed out the evening with a heartfelt pinch of lucid, satirical quips that brightened the faces in the crowd. These mostly tied in with the message of the lyrics of individual songs, like the one about the legendary Yugoslav candies – the nostalgic »505 s črto«.
In the final finale of the second half, which Bilbi sang completely barefoot – which doesn’t mean she didn’t also use steps drawn from jazz ballet on stage – the peak was brought on stage by the experience with Miha Guštin »Gušti«. The guy, still hot from the night before, when he warmed up nearly 3,000 heads in the small hall of Hala Tivoli ahead of the performance by Yu-rock legend Bajaga – RockLine report HERE, dressed up as Santa at the request of one of Bilbi’s fans. A lanky beanpole in lumberjack boots, with a goatee like Kekec’s Brinclj and in an atypical red Santa getup, he cradled a four-string ukulele and performed three numbers with Bilbi and the gang, among them an excellently reworked version of the Big Foot Mama original called Črni tulipan (»Hello Chantal!«, if you happen to be reading this), which definitely got a sophisticated, juicy organic upgrade, keeping all the energy of the original, while the soul-blues makeup of Bilbi’s vocal performance (in a duet with Gušti) and the arrangement solutions of the backing crew worked so well that this “converted” version could easily come out as a special single. In the near future. Bilbi and Gušti in a duet on Črni tulipan – a great combination, then.
For the obligatory encore the band repeated Iskrice, Hvala za vijolice and Če srce se vname, and the evening finally wrapped up after almost two hours. Bilbi’s combination with her revamped backing crew works great. Let’s hope it holds up in this form for as long as possible and that, in the medium term, it perhaps brings a rough blueprint for the tracks of the singer’s next studio album.
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