Jeff Beck summer tour with Buddy Guy

[Wah3]

Anyone have a pre-sale code for Foxwoods or Canandaigua?
Jeff Beck 2016 Tour Dates
7/19 — Port Chester, N.Y.
7/20 — New York, N.Y.
7/22 — Mashantucket, Ct.*
7/23 — Atlantic City, N.J.
7/24 — Bethlehem, Pa.*
7/26 — Homdel, N.J.
7/27 — Vienna, Va.
7/29 — Canandaigua, N.Y.
7/30 — Rochester Hills, Mich.
7/31 — Highland Park, Ill.
8/03 — Nashville, Tenn.
8/10 — Los Angeles, Calif.
* = Jeff Beck solo date

[markwoll]

Getting my tickets tomorrow for Vienna, Va

[SteveSly]

That is one hell of a double bill. I have seen Guy several times in the last few years and he is still great.

[Jeremy Bender]

The Los Angeles date is at the Hollywood Bowl, which is unfortunate. Due to all the houses that surround the venue, the sound can be iffy unless you're down in the boxes or first section of seats. I've sat near the back for people like Neil Young & Crazy Horse and Radiohead and it was like listening to a radio from ten feet away. I saw him at the Greek Theater (6,000 capacity) years ago, that was ideal.

Sure, I'm going to the Hollywood Bowl show.

[Wah3]

The presale code for CMAC in Canandaigua is LETMELIE

[Supersonic Scientist]

Too bad there's no Atlanta date.

[Wah3]

Setlist and review (from New York Times) of show at Madison Square Garden.

The Revolution Will Be Televised
Freeway Jam
Stratus
(Billy Cobham cover)
Live in the Dark
The Ballad of the Jersey Wives
The Pump
Morning Dew
(Bonnie Dobson cover) (with Jimmy Hall)
A Change Is Gonna Come
(Sam Cooke cover) (with Jimmy Hall)
Big Block
A Girl Like You
Cause We've Ended as Lovers
(Syreeta cover)
O.I.L. (Can't Get Enough of That Sticky)
Scared for the Children
Superstition
(Stevie Wonder cover) (with Jimmy Hall)
Right Now
A Day in the Life
(The Beatles cover)
Encore:
Rollin' and Tumblin'
(Hambone Willie Newbern cover) (with Jimmy Hall)

The paranormally skilled guitarist Jeff Beck, now 72, has just released a new album called “Loud Hailer,” with a very mundane image on the front cover: a megaphone. He made it with new band members, including the young English singer Rosie Bones and the guitar player Carmen Vandenberg; its songs are full of passionate, if clumsy, protests and allegations about war, income inequality, oil dependency and consumer passivity.

When he performed on Wednesday night at the Theater at Madison Square Garden in a double bill with the blues guitarist Buddy Guy, that topical rage grew diffuse, if it was there at all. He doesn’t talk to his audiences much, but on this occasion he said nothing. Rosie Bones sang the new songs, and in the first one, “The Revolution Will Be Televised,” walked through the crowd with a megaphone. Amazingly, for any presentation of musical agitprop in 2016, no visual images were displayed onstage, and the import of the words failed to come across: She’s a strong-voiced, bluesy, bar-band-ish kind of rock singer, not the kind who stuns you with an idea.

That left you with the music, which was presumably what the audience was there for in the first place. (Another bluesy singer, Jimmy Hall, once of the 1970s band Wet Willie, sang the set’s older blues and R&B songs — “A Change Is Gonna Come,” “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” — with dutiful soul.) The truly old-fashioned impression you come away with from a Jeff Beck concert isn’t the guitar-band setup; there are still plenty of new guitar bands. It’s the dramatic attention to what he is doing with his hands, and how he is doing it.

There was something particular, specialized and unusual about pretty much every individual sound he produced: his chords, struck roughly with his thumb, framed with strange temporal relations to the beat, and then clipped off; his sparing and startling use of fast legato flourishes; his almost constant patrolling of microtonal areas, all the pitches between the notes, through the careful use of his tremolo bar in his right hand and the fingers of his left hand; his ways of making a phrase sound physical, falling and rising and pulsating. Mr. Beck is virtuosic, he’s dramatic, and he’s in a permanent musical state of controlled volatility, and he doesn’t ever go out of tune.

But beyond all that is an old show-business virtue that lies outside music. This is prestidigitation, a kind of large-theater magic-show. (It feels very early-20th-century.) You wonder, “How did he do that?” once, then twice, and then you have too many questions to keep track of: He’s got you, no matter how middling the surrounding sounds might be.

This band — also including Rhonda Smith on bass and Jonathan Joseph on drums — was better than middling, and more exciting than on “Loud Hailer,” though still basically a background for Mr. Beck. (A little further description, because they deserve it: Their sound was heavy and whomping, full of hard funk and flash, its weight and texture sometimes reminiscent of Living Colour.)

For about five minutes in Mr. Beck’s performance, he served as rhythm guitarist behind the leads of Mr. Guy, who had played the opening set. It was of interest, but it wasn’t the night’s best five minutes. Mr. Guy, now 79, assuredly influenced Mr. Beck, but that was long ago. They’re both playing blues language on Fender Stratocasters with amazing confidence, but they have different rhythms of showmanship; each needs his own space to do his own strange things.

Mr. Guy’s set, chatty and casual, ended with a longish guest solo by a 13-year-old hotshot guitarist named Brandon Niederauer, and otherwise veered between extremes. One had to do with quiet. Several times he ordered his band to proceed behind him at very low volume or cut out completely, and he played delicately, singing the blues in a hurt falsetto. That could result in something charming, as when he walked to the side of the stage, laid his guitar down on a speaker, let a feedback squeal slowly arise from it, then whapped his guitar strap over the strings to silence it.

The other had to do with noise. Mr. Guy has long been into aggressive playing and screaming tones, but on Wednesday he was into noise. Regularly, during his solos (or sometimes all the way through them, as on “Someone Else Is Steppin’ In”) he played small, melodic, single-note figures on one or two strings, but they were barely audible: At the same time, he was strumming all of the other strings, leaving them open and unfretted, letting you experience dissonance — or confidence — as a main course.

[gpeccary]

Saw the show at Foxwoods in CT. Ashamed to say I only knew Buddy Guy by reputation...not his music He. Was. AMAZING...
Jeffs show, unsurprisingly, was great too. He didn't play during Guys set, or vice versa. Loud Hailer was fantastic live. Only heard it twice prior to the show, didn't grab me immediately, but I kew he'd crush it live...i wasn't wrong.

Word to the wise....be prepared for a lot more singing than when I saw him during Who Else and on the double bill with Brian Wilson. The chick on loud hailer was great!

[flowerking]

Setlist and review (from New York Times) of show at Madison Square Garden.

Thanks for posting this review. Why do music reviews have to sound like pompous assholes? Is it because they don't understand the music they are trying to review? Complaining that the stage had no visuals so the protest songs lost something because they were only sung? Geez, this NYT writer should be hired by Rolling Stone immediately.

[gearHed289]

I'm going to see this show on the 31st. Living in the Chicago, area, I'm lucky to get to see Buddy Guy every January when he does his annual run of shows at his club in the city. STILL amazing an inspiring to watch this man play guitar and address an audience. He's fun, he's badass, he's funny, and he plays with fire and passion.

This past week I got texts from 2 friends with wildly different opinions on Loud Hailer. One was flipping out over it, the other basically said "not so good". I listened to about half of it, and I have to say, to me it's just OK. I always admire the guy for trying new things, but I'd like to hear less vocals and more live rhythm section. I'm sure it will be a whole new experience in a live setting.