28 March 2015 (gig)
29 March 2015
With most artists reviewing a live show is pretty simple. You know pretty well exactly what they will play and all you have to concern yourself with is a running order. Ian Siegal is most definitely NOT ‘most artists’.
The Jazz Café was heaving, welcoming home one of England’s finest Blues artists to celebrate his new live album ‘One Night In Amsterdam’ and after a few numbers Siegal took off like a firework.
Never predictable, he kept the crowd and his own band guessing with some classics, some not-so-classics and threw in a few off the wall moments as well. The crowd lapped it up and the more they got into it, the more Siegal did and the wider his smile got the better he sounded – win/win/win.
Personal favourites were plenty – his stunning version of Joe Ely’s ‘Gallo Del Cielo’ is a stone classic and he turned it on large with ‘I Am The Train’ and ‘Going To California’ but to hear him play ‘John The Revelator’ again – one of Son House’s finest songs but brilliant when given the Siegal touch – sent this reporter into peals of joy.
The band were superb, essentially the same crew from the album including Danny Vanatof on bass and Dusty Ciggaar on guitar, and they matched Siegal perfectly.
He constantly mixes his music up, playing at one moment with this band and then with the North Mississippi Allstars or Jimbo Mathus and it was typical of the man to play a tribute to Robert Balfour, one of the Mississippi Hill Country’s founders and recently lost.
Apart from growling at the crowd to either shut up or switch their phone cameras off he was in a great mood and the night whizzed by like a blur until he sang us out with the Band’s ‘I Shall Be Released'.
Another great Ian Siegal night and one more to live in the memory.
®Laurence Harvey
