The rock piano icon returned to the Meijer Gardens amphitheater on Sunday with his band, The Noisemakers, delivering a mix of hits and jams. The review and photos.
Back in West Michigan: Hornsby first played Grand Rapids in 1986. (Photo/Katy Batdorff)
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With a warm breeze wafting across the crowd, Bruce Hornsby & The Noisemakers enthralled concertgoers at Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park on Sunday night.
A blend of old hits and deep cuts, plus some new songs. beguiled the devoted audience, who hung on the 71-year-old singer’s every expressive lyric, plink of the piano and strum of the dulcimer.
Promising to sing the “top requests” made by fans, Hornsby and his band traversed the decades with “Circus on the Moon,” a 2004 song inspired by the then rise in school shootings. The arc of the song built masterfully to a crescendo of pounding piano and urgent fiddling. 1988’s “Look Out the Window” grapples with environmental damage and air pollution, with the singer crying in disbelief, “This can’t be real.”
The sheer variety of genres played by the musicians –- from pop to folk to jazz, country and rock — places them in a class of their own. “Gulf of Mexico Fishing Boat Blues” showed off the Virginia native’s bluegrass stylings. The rootsy toe tapper was released in 2007 as a duet with Ricky Skaggs.
Such artistry is never content with churning out just old hits, and Hornsby and his band released a new album this spring called “Indigo Park,” the title track of which they played for Jimmy Fallon’s TV audience and the crowd on Sunday night.
Songs Pretty and Jamming: Hornsby on stage at Meijer Gardens. (Photo/Katy Batdorff)
Another track from the album, the soothing “North Dakota Slate Roof,” was a highlight for this reviewer, with its themes of escaping the pressures of modern life and finding oasis on a bison farm. The shelter the songwriter dreams of seems as sturdy and abiding as songs that stand the test of time, impervious to the winds of change.
For concertgoer Julie Vale of Holland, Hornsby’s music has endured for at least 40 years. It was September 5, 1986, when she and some friends saw the artist in a free, WLAV-sponsored concert on Calder Plaza.
“I was 20-something then,” she said. “(Hornsby and his then band, the Range) were amazing, and tonight they are nailing it. It’s perfect.”
For her, “The Way It Is,” Hornsby’s smash hit from 1986, hit in a meaningful way. “Do you want to hear the pretty version or the jamming version?” Hornsby asked, going with a hybrid that was both pretty and jamming. Concertgoers got up and started dancing for the first time in the show.
Another high point was “Across the River,” Hornsby’s 1990 hit that originally featured Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia on guitar, which turned into a high voltage, free-form jam session.
Just about the time concertgoers were wondering why there were three dulcimers propped up on stage, Hornsby swapped his piano bench for a chair and began to play the Appalachian instrument, joined by his bandmates on the spoons and the mandolin. (Two of his bandmates, Gibb Droll on guitar and John Mailander on mandolin and fiddle, provided opening support with several delightful, bluegrass/folk tunes as the duo The Light Echo.)
As the sky began to darken and a crescent moon popped out, Hornsby and his band began to wind down with “Mandolin Rain,” another hit from 1986 that elicited all the feelings of lost love in a poetic song about summer rain. The classic song was as evocative as ever, because in the words of another favorite Hornsby song, “Some things will never change.”
(Hornsby returns to Michigan to play Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor on Oct. 2.)
UP NEXT AT MEIJER GARDENS: ZZ Top, with Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band, plays Meijer Gardens on Aug. 26. Tickets, $110, available online here. The Tuesday Evening Music Club series features the Grand Rapids Jazz Orchestra with the Northview High School Jazz Band at 7 p.m. Tuesday (Aug. 19).
PHOTO GALLERY: Bruce Hornsby & The Noisemakers at Meijer Gardens
Photos by Katy Batdorff
