Heartbreak Aplenty
Robert Cray Band Sunday, Aug. 7, The Festival at Sandpoint<
Robert Cray loves a big soul ballad, so he sang a lot of them Sunday.
When he was playing clubs, Cray called his band the Robert Cray Blues Band, but now they’re going under the banner of “America’s premier rhythm and blues band,” and the distinction tells plenty.
Cray set the stage Sunday with two strong hits of infidelity - “Smoking Gun” and “Strong Persuader” - and set about exploring the seams between blues, gospel and R&B. After shuffling personnel for a decade, Cray now has a band that can lay down skin-tight textures under his marvelously fluid vocals and stinging guitar.
Jimmy Pugh’s organ moaned and wailed, his piano bounced through the mix with barrelhouse grit. The Miami Horns - sax and trumpet - laid back, adding stately brass commentary on the air of heartbreak that attends most of these songs. Cray doesn’t use horns to brighten a song but to add weight and, in fact, beauty. As Ellington knew - or Miles Davis and John Coltrane - the harmonics of a sax and trumpet chorus resonates with something profound.
Edward Manion’s crying sax solo on the Lowell Fulsome ballad “Reconsider” was the exception - and he won a big hand for it.
If the term weren’t so ambiguous, Cray’s sound might best be described as soul music; it’s music of loss and redemption, though there’s not much redemption in Cray’s version, and there’s heartbreak aplenty.
He’s the other man in “Strong Persuader,” the abandoned one in “You’re Gonna Need Me,” the cuckold in “Smoking Gun.”
Cray has matured into a first-rate singer. One moment, his pure tenor slides into a falsetto with the ease of a young Al Greene, the next it’s being ripped from his chest as he wails with the gospel fervor of O.V. Wright. One is the sweet sound of union, the other the agony of separation.
Cray has described himself as a soul singer and a blues guitarist, but even as a guitarist he goes further than most. He’s a wonderful singleline soloist and can bend a note with the best of them, but his brilliance lies in his sense of harmonics. Going way down in a down-and-dirty takeyour-baby-in-your-arms ballad, he dropped through minor chords as if he were tumbling down soft stairs. There’s a touch of Fenton Robinson’s surprising harmonic vision in Cray’s work that places him at the fringes of jazz, though the rhythms tend to remain resolutely R&B.
But Cray plays with rhythms, too. The Latinesque “I Was Warned,” which ended the show, played strikingly jazz-like modalities against seductive rhythms, going way beyond pure blues.
Cray, always a master of the blues, is now creating musical worlds of his own making.
Too Slim and the Taildraggers opened with a vibrant set of chugging electric blues. Thousands of road miles and hundreds of gigs have turned this band into a tight, hardhitting unit: crackling drums and a strong bass support Tim Langford’s sparkling slide guitar and inventive leads.
The evening’s only weak spot was the ongoing conflict between dancers and watchers. Asking people to sit for most of the show is one thing, but expecting them to stay down during the encore set is inexcusable - this isn’t TV folks, it’s the blues.