OH MY GAWD!! (Reg. US Patent Off.) Remember when a Rolling Stone editor (G. Marcus?) wrote, "Tonight I saw the future of rock 'n roll. His name is.... Bruce Springsteen." ? Well, tonight I saw Ani De Franco. I don't have any of Ms. DiFranco's recordings but she was highly recommended on JMDL so I went. Here is my experience. I walked in 5 minutes into her set and man, the audience was esctatic. She did a song with lots and lots of syncopation and false endings; I love rhythmn so I gave her a gold star on the spot. Then she did her hit song "32 Flavors (and then some)" and man, was the band tight! Another gold star. Between songs she cooed that she had "spotted a beauty in pink, down front here! Man, is THAT s sight for sore eyes!" Okay, she gets a silver star from me for being bold and honest about her passions. Next, she started a song with the startling observation that "White people are so afraid of black people." She noticed that "the Berlin Wall is alive and well on Main Street", "dividing East from West". (Now in Cincinnati, there just happens to BE a demarcation between the blue-collar West siders and the professionals and managers on the East side. The crowd cheered.) Then she noted the "loop-de-loop streets" (cul-de-sacs of suburbia?) and finished by flatly stating that America is "one big subdivision." Oh, my! Then she had a story about a New Yorker "selling hairdriers out of a gym bag" who theorizes that the stuff 'they' are spraying, supposedly to kill the disease that the mosquitos are carrying, is a potion to keep us down. He delivers this news to Ani "as one lab rat to another". Well, she gets a gold star for _lyrics_ too! Then they did a number where the band sounded like a cross between Weather Report and the Crusaders. Oh gees! Another gold star. By now the parallels were piling up faster than you can say "Deep". <Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge. Knowing glance. Say no more!> On the next song, the band was doing a Cuban jazz thing. Okay, how many gold stars can she credibly get in one evening for music? She hit so many of my musical hot spots, it was uncanny! Then she did a song where she sounded like a 50s hipster, rapping against a swinging jazzy rhythmn. She swings too. Another gold star. Then she did a duo with her keyboard player who turned out to be a woman. While they traded solos, Laura (Laurie?) got closer, and closer, and closer. Then kissed her. Okay, so now her conditional silver star for courage and honesty has been upgraded to a gold star. (Suddenly I was remembering Charles Mingus saying "She's a nervy broad!") In many of her songs, she used rock to (dare I say it?) add brush stokes of texture <wink> in short figures or longer interludes. Another gold star. She did some credible scatting. Another gold star. The evening was over far too quickly. No, I mean that literally- she did, like 75 minutes! Far too early! But, as my half-Jewish cousins on Long Island might ask, "What's not to like?" -- As I was filling out of the theatre, a couple behind me was discussing Ani: She: "So.. is she JUST lyrics, now?" He: "....... No." All the best, Jim "in love again" L'Hommedieu np: Steve & Leslie Mixon's former band, The Yazoo Blues Revue" "OH MY GAWD!!" is a registered trademark, jointly held by Kakki and Paz of the Joni Mitchell Internet Community and is used with their permission. Thank you.
