| Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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Minimalism reveals Costello's brilliance
Jon M. Gilbertson
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Touring must be useful for Elvis Costello, and not just because the modern tour grants a license to print money.
The idle hours on buses and planes, or at sound checks, probably allow him to map out the next phase of his career. Perhaps all those collaborations with gifted musicians, and those explorations of everything from country to classical quartet, resulted from periods of killing time on the road.
After spending too much of that time not playing Milwaukee, Costello returned Friday night to pack the Riverside Theatre, and he continued the roll he's been on lately. Bringing along keyboardist Steve Nieve — possibly the most talented of the Attractions, Costello's regularly amazing backing band — but no one else, he spent well over two hours reminding the crowd of his brilliance.
Which is not the way he would have put it, nor was that implicit in his presentation. Although Costello strapped on an electric guitar late in the set, he generally stuck to acoustic, and apart from a brief solo segment, he let Nieve color in the spaces around his strumming. Nieve, resembling a cross between dignified orchestra pianist and rumpled rock sideman, added an essential melodic aspect, and the ability to move from key-pounding frenzy to elegant precision.
Considering the breadth of Costello's catalog, this was important. Of course, he touched upon his recent partnership with uber-songwriter Burt Bacharach, the Grammy-winning Painted From Memory. Although ornate songs such as "In the Darkest Place" and "Toledo" lacked the lushness of the album versions, the spare rendering brought out a slightly stronger emotional potential.
Indeed, Costello sang mightily, using a third-rate voice in a first-rate way, capturing more feeling and meaning in a cracked note or a pause than Shania Twain can muster over an entire album. Jumping from the sad splendor of "The Long Honeymoon" to the short, sharp shocks of "Little Triggers" and the old-fashioned country-pop of "Our Little Angel" and "Radio Sweetheart," he used a supposedly limited range to evoke a varied palette of shadings and subtleties.
It gradually became clear that Costello and Nieve had hit upon something with the piano-and-guitar setup: a kind of unity. The songs of a diverse lifetime all bore the same minimalism, yet each was also different. After three encores, including a heartbreaking rendition of Charles Aznavour's "She," the intensely avid crowd obviously hadn't wearied of the two-man concept.
And why should they? Costello might be idle on the way to shows, but on stage, his next move is almost always worth watching, or hearing.
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Copyright 1999, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. All rights reserved.
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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, June 13, 1999
Jon M. Gilbertson reviews Elvis Costello and Steve Nieve, Friday, June 11, 1999, Riverside Theatre , Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Dave Tianen reports on the Fleadh Festival, Friday, June 12, 1999, Chicago Motor Speedway, Cicero, Illinois.
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Chicago's Guinness event a
Fleadh of talent and a sea of mud
Dave Tianen
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Chicago — For much of the afternoon, glowering skies threatened to turn the 1999 Guinness Fleadh into the Guinness Flood.
Fortunately, the sky made angry faces but never did much more than sprinkle. A real downpour at Saturday's event could have been devastating because Friday night's thunderboomers had turned much of the Chicago Motor Speedway into an ankle-deep mudhole.
The combination of sandal-sucking mud and hip-to-hip crowds made moving between the Fleadh's three stages a minor quest. Still, the new grounds were a marked improvement over last year's event at the Arlington Race Course. This year's festival offered a dramatic increase in the supply of food and beverage vendors.
As with last year, the 1999 Guinness Fleadh offered an absolutely glittering array of music talent: Van Morrison, Elvis Costello, Steve Earle, John Prine, Taj Mahal, Lucinda Williams, Hootie & the Blowfish, Luka Bloom, Joe Henry and Beth Orton, among others.
The afternoon's performances demonstrated again that success at these gigantic outdoor shows has as much or more to do with style as intrinsic musical talent. Lucinda Williams' knowing update of outlaw country made her 1998 album Car Wheels on a Gravel Road a critical favorite, second only to the Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.
But Williams tends to write gritty, slice-of-life ballads and character sketches such as "Drunken Angel," but they really need the focus of a club or theater to reveal their full merit. Williams sounds like an older, more road-weary Sheryl Crow, and she did prosper with a few of her more muscular rockers. Better suited to the occasion were Taj Mahal and the Irish party rockers, Saw Doctors. Taj wisely turned to proven party starters like "Hoochie Coochie Coo" and "Oow Poop Pa Poo" to beat the heat. Although he had to be one of the three or four senior folks on the premises, there was no sign that time or humidity could wilt Taj.
"Are your hips ready?" he challenged the crowd before pounding through "I Need You Lovin'."
A couple of suggestions for next year's festival if it returns to the speedway: These megashows really cry out for big-screen television, particularly where the sound board tent blocks much of the sight line. Also, organizers need to relocate the VH-1 stage and the main stage to reduce sound spill.
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Copyright 1999, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. All rights reserved.
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