REVIEW: LAURYN HILL AT THE SANTA CRUZ CATALYST: THE RECONSTRUCTION OF THE SINGER AND THE RE-EDUCATION OF HER FANS
Brad Kava, 01:31 PM in Brad Kava, Celebrities, Concerts, Music
With only two days notice to sell tickets, Lauryn Hill, one of hip-hop's biggest crossover stars, showed up at the small Catalyst nightclub in Santa Cruz Saturday, with a new Afro-pop meets jazz sound that was so different from the sound that made her famous, that even when she played the hits, they were unrecognizable.
It's not unusual for big stars to try out new material in small out of the way clubs, particuarly when they are recording in Los Angeles and want to get away from the buzz of the music industry beehive down there. It's a huge thrill for fans, who get to hear the new material first.
But Saturday's two-hour-long set was a disappointment for many who thought the small venue meant a more intimate place to hear a great singer do her softer, melodic material on 1998's "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill" that won five Grammys.
HIll did anything but kill them softly with her songs.
Wearing her hair in a giant Afro, and in baggy clothes that screamed thrift shop, she hardly sang at all, choosing instead to rap, Jamaican or African style, with a torrent of speeding words, backed by a 13-piece experimental jazz band with three guitars, three horns, two keyboards, a drummer, a thunderious standup bass and three singers.
It brought to mind the grandfather of her children, Bob Marley, and even more, Africa's great improviser Fela Kuti, who shouted and mystically chanted over the same type of hard jazz improvisations. There was some James Brown funk in there too, and she often threw his name into the lyrics.
The night was part train wreck and part a brilliant reinvention of a hugely talented woman who grew so sick of the music industry that she has taken several years of exile from it.
The worst thing about it was that she started two hours late, a big disrespect to fans who paid $50 or $65 and traveled from all over for the show. There was no announcement or explanation until the two hours had passed, and no apology from Hill.
The band came out at 11:30 and played a ten-minute improvisation that was as atonal and discordant as the work of the experimental jazz master, Sun Ra.
Then, Hill, 31, took her place, in big sunglasses, shouting the lyrics to "Lost Ones" and interspersing them with commands to the soundman: "I need more vocals in the monitor, more vocals in the monitor, I'd like to hear more," she rapped.
It was a technique that came up throughout the night, as if this band hadn't rehearsed enough and she was giving them orders while she was performing. Several times she broke it down, silencing the musicians and getting into a sing-song repetitions with the three female singers, who had chirpy voices like the "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" pop trios of the 1940s.
"Don't stop playing, just bring the level down," she sang to the band, during a hard-thumping rendition of her once sweet "To Zion," repeating the phrase "My Joy, my joy, my joy," like an incantation.
Was this a rehearsal of a band that needed much more work, or was this an inspired genius creating new music right in front of her fans? It was probably some of both, but there was a great satisfaction in watching this artist completely redefine herself.
Her initial fame was in blunting the edges of hip-hop with her band, the Fugees. Her wistful, strong voice, on songs by the likes of Roberta Flack in the mid 1990s, was a huge step to the mainstream for the music once known as rap, that was mostly shouted by men before that and had few real musicians in the mix.
Hard jazz and Afro pop would have been the last thing you expected to hear from the woman who graced Time Magazine's cover in 1999 like a fashion model, and that in itself speaks volumes of an artist who is willing to take the biggest risks to present her vision.
It was thrilling to see, after hearing so many winery-level performers, whose idea of a concert is to sound just like the album. She had me at hello, and this after I was ready to walk out after the rude two-hour wait. (Hill did two similar shows at San Francisco's Great American Music Hall in June.)
The way she repeated phrases, improvised and snaked words around the rhythms was mystical, and reminded me of seeing Marley. The fact that the acoustics were wrong, with too many musicians on too small a stage, was also like Marley, who I saw in a college gymnasium, and who played off the echoes and distortion, like he meant it to be that way.
She covered Marley's "Zimbabwe" like she owned it, taking it away from the laid back reggae of Island ganja and took it back to Africa, where the beat was as hard-driving as a rocky dirt road. Hill has four kids with Marley's son, Rohan.
Then, in an almost comic turn, she showed a softer side, reading lyrics sheets to cover Carole King's "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" and Burt Bacharach's "Do You Know the Way to San Jose?"
The song about San Jose losers, seemed a bit autobiographical at that moment, as some disgusted fans streamed out of her show. She started it solo, with a few band members chiming in, as if they didn't expect it. She laughed, said, "Can I do this?" and then started it again, with the whole band playing it with finesse, like they meant it and had indeed polished it earlier.
The Santa Cruz crowd, that mostly stood dumbfounded, but applauded after every song, finally got dancing as she shared "new takes on the Fugees' "Ready or Not" and her own, "Everything is Everything," which kept enough of the original hooks to make them recognizable.
"I'm very disappointed," said Nelsy Batista, 21, of Berkeley, who walked out of the show early and was really expecting a softer, dinner music set. "She was one of my idols because of her lyrics and you can't even hear them like this. It's all distorted, the sound is bad. What kind of drug is she on?"
The biggest crime Ms. Hill comitted was not introducing the members of the band, who made such driving music and kept it on the road, even when her whims sent it lurching. They deserved more.
It's always a challenge to hear a performer stray from the path that made her famous and lose the structures that were played endlessly on radio.
But it can also be one of the greatest rewards. The greatest artists take you somewhere you didn't expect to be, and make you want to go back for more.
That's what she did. Her next album may not be a Grammy hit, but I can't wait to listen to it.
http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/2006/07/r...w_lauryn_h.html