Imagine sitting around a living room with a handful of your closest friends. At the same time, one of the most influential songwriters of this generation regales you with a seemingly endless supply of breathtaking performances and engrossing stories for an entire evening. This idyllic scenario played out Saturday evening at the historic Warner Theater in Washington D.C. as Bruce Hornsby visited the nation’s capitol with his longtime band, The Noisemakers.
Following an engaging opening set from Edie Brickell’s experimental electronic trio Heavy MakeUp, Hornsby led his supremely talented ensemble through two-plus hours of some of his most cherished material in an incredibly intimate setting.
Though this current jaunt along the East Coast has been billed as the “Spirit Trail 25th Anniversary Tour,” celebrating his critically acclaimed double-LP release from 1998, Bruce threw the audience a curveball by performing only one track from the album throughout the entire evening. This is just another example in a long line of the pianist’s hilariously contrarian musical stylings. A hallmark of Bruce’s live performances is that much of the material presented on any given night features a vastly different arrangement than its studio counterpart, and Saturday night was no exception.
Kicking things off in the ornate neo-renaissance concert hall, which is celebrating its hundredth year in existence, the sextet gracefully navigated through some newer material, including “My Resolve” before landing on “Circus on the Moon”. Unlike the album version from Bruce’s 2004 release, Halcyon Days, which is teeming with his The Range-influenced pop sensibilities, tonight’s rendition featured several jazzy interludes as well as some exhilarating back and forth between Hornsby and multi-instrumentalist John Mailander on the fiddle. This musical theme would be repeated throughout the evening, much to the delight of the appreciative attendees.
A goosebump-inducing version of Bruce’s classic “Mandolin Rain” featured a bluegrass breakdown apropos of its subject matter before the lone Spirit Trail performance of the evening, an extended romp through the Harper Lee-inspired “Sneaking up on Boo Radley”.
One of the evening’s standout moments occurred when an audience request, a long-standing tradition at Hornsby’s live performances, led to an impromptu version of “Swing Street” with Bruce’s hilariously terse intro, “Here we go, sucking in public.” More Hot House material followed, with an inspired take on “Country Doctor” in which the band cleverly worked in some “Big Rumble” quotes before tackling Bruce’s beloved civil rights-era anthem, “The Way It Is”.
Featuring a more relaxed and expansive arrangement that recently debuted at a BBC Radio performance earlier this year, this version of Bruce’s 1980s mega-hit led off with a serene solo piano intro. It stretched for nearly ten minutes, eliciting multiple raucous ovations from the rapt audience.
Adding to the intimate living room vibes was Hornsby’s dulcimer segment, a regular interval at his performances that finds Bruce, Mailander, and drummer Chad Wright manning a musical washboard while taking center stage on a trio of folding chairs. Newer material such as “Is This It”, “Tipping” and “Prairie Dog Town”, the latter which features samples from Snoop Dogg’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot” on the original recording from Bruce’s 2009 release Levitate, rang out with a distinct Appalachian quality thanks to the augmented personnel arrangement.
Bruce then switched over to the accordion to close the set with a buoyant medley that combined “Big Stick” and its entertaining prerequisite tale about how it was ultimately included on the soundtrack to Kevin Costner’s 1996 rom-com Tin Cup, along with a bluegrass-centric rendition of “Jacob’s Ladder,” which was popularized by Huey Lewis & The News in the 1980s.
After taking a brief moment to introduce his band and extend a heartfelt thanks to the crowd, most of whom remained for the entirety of the evening, Bruce returned to his Steinway & Sons grand piano for tear-jerking performances of “Never in This House” and his infamous ballad “The End of the Innocence”, the latter of which was teeming with slinky Jerry Garcia-inspired guitar licks from Gibb Droll.
While this latest stop on Bruce’s “Spirit Trail 25th Anniversary Tour” may have barely featured any actual Spirit Trail material, a testament to the pianist’s wonderfully ironic musical sense of humor, there was still more than enough first-class musicianship and song selection to remind everyone that, even after forty-plus years as a performer, Bruce Hornsby remains amongst the most influential American musicians of the modern era.
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Pretty sure Bruce was playing a Yamaha piano at the Warner.