Ian Anderson, 30 years into his career with Jethro Tull, still capers about the stage like a Dickensian madman, leaping before posing with legs akimbo and his flute held like a musical baton. These are familiar touchstones for the band’s fanbase, as are the multitude of Anderson songs that have morphed over the years, yet remained familiar.
The thousands of folks who showed up for the Tull concert at the Erie County Fairgrounds knew the bulk of the material played and were rewarded with an impeccable performance that veered far away from the hack oldies schtick often marring appearances by the artistically decimated Beach Boys and other baby-boom bands.
Anderson, the sun about whom the band’s history revolves, is a master of playing to the audience and mining the baroque-sounding material that has provided the core of the group’s oeuvre for decades.
Guitarist Martin Barre has been the other long-term notable stylist in the band, and many of the classic Tull tunes played Saturday night (“Locomotive Breath,” “Aqualung,” “Thick as a Brick”) would have suffered the loss of his densely-textured strands of sound punctuating and driving the melodic hooks Anderson has written. No other major rock guitarist uses, with any degree of consistency, the same tonal qualities Barre attacks in his capacity as provider of aural counterpoint to Anderson’s sly troubadour.
The Young Dubliners, a dynamic Celtic-tinged outfit from Southern California (two members of the sextet originally hail from Ireland), whipped through a 45-minute set drawn mostly from their fourth album, Red. The title tune and a rousing take on the Waterboys’ standard “Fisherman’s Blues” earned the band an enthusiastic response from the audience, boding well for their future.
Get your own Free Home Page