Venue: Bluesiana Rock Cafe / Velden / Austria
Concert date: 14.07.2011
Attendance: 100
Ticket price: €32.00 (advance) / €36.00 (day of show)
Summer weather followed us all the way to Velden, an Austrian town that comes fully alive in the warm months. Packed streets, restaurants, hotels – completely different from winter, when Velden is dead as a doornail.
We’d been looking forward to getting back to Bluesiana. The moment you walk in, you’re hit by a homey feeling that probably never goes away. The piano has moved, and now you can see the whole fireplace, which only adds to the cozy vibe. A few little tables with chairs in the “standing” area and a couch in front of the mixing desk could suggest a mellower musical experience. What a wrong guess for a Philip Sayce show!
Philip Sayce has been honing his guitar talent since his early teens. At 15 he played in his first band and soon became an old familiar face on the Toronto club scene. When he played with the legendary Jeff Healey at one of his many jam sessions, Healey invited him to join his band. After three years playing with Healey, Philip decided to go solo. In 2005 he released his first solo album, followed by 2 more in the years since.
Despite the rather steep ticket price, a decent crowd of good-blues and Philip Sayce fans turned up at Bluesiana. And they weren’t disappointed. Philip got every seated listener up on their feet the moment he walked on stage, kicking off with the energetic One foot in the grave. The show kept ramping up through the first 4 songs, by which point Philip was completely soaked from all that energy (and the heat inside the place). The crowd soaked up the slick riffs and guitar tricks Sayce was pulling off, while he was backed by equally well-versed Fritz Lewak on drums and bassist Joel Gottschalk. After the high-energy opening came a guitar switch and a calmer moment with the gorgeous instrumental Alchemy , during which all of us in the audience could close our eyes and drift off on slowed-down blues rhythms, listening to nimble fingers literally playing with the strings. Sayce shut his eyes along with us and gave himself over, body and soul, to the sounds he was making. Listening to his music, you can’t miss the influence of legends Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughn, and there are also more modern touches of Lenny Kravitz. Philip jolted us out of our dreamy daze with Take you away, then went on to enchant and amuse us by entertaining the crowd with all sorts of tricks: from using a bottle as a slide, to playing the guitar with a towel wrapped around his fingers, messing around with the springs on the back of the guitar and rubbing the strings against the ceiling of Bluesiana. While playing, Sayce wandered through the audience totally relaxed, guitar in hand – he made his way around the entire club. Moving along like that, he led us on to an exciting drum solo during Angels live inside. Lewak got a chance to show off his rhythmic talent, and Gottschalk joined him on bass with real energy, going full power play and managing to snap a string on the bass (the top/thickest one, of course). Apparently this happens to him quite often, since it’s not exactly standard practice at Bluesiana for a bassist to have a backup instrument on stage. After the song Ruby electric came the first goodbye, but not for long, because the crowd protested loudly the whole time and demanded an encore. Philip and the others didn’t keep us waiting. Coming back on, Philip also pointed out the release of his new live album “Ruby Electric”, which was recorded at a concert in France and came out at the start of this month. Philip treated the crowd to two more songs, thanked everyone who came out loudly (he was especially impressed by a group of Hungarian fans who needed 6 hours to get to Bluesiana), and invited people to get their CDs signed over a beer.
A concert full of good old blues, mixed with modern touches of rock and funk, ended with Philip deliberately breaking first 4 strings on his guitar before the end of Bitter Monday, then soloing a bit on the other two, and finally snapping those too. The circle of tricks was complete, and the crowd was more than happy with what they’d heard and seen. Philip Sayce is definitely a musician worth catching live again, thanks to his professionalism and his easygoing manner.
photos: Greg Žagar
Setlist
1. One foot in the grave 2. Powerful thing 3. Slip away 4. Changes 5. Alchemy 6. Take you away 7. Are you ready 8. King of New Mexico 9. Angel slive inside 10 . Cinnamon girl 11. As the years go passing by 12. Dream Away 13. Ruby electric —encore— 14. Little Mis America 15. Were you there 16. Bitter Monday
Photo Gallery
