Without the ability to take photos, shine a phone’s light or document a moment beyond its present, T Bone Burnett’s Mischief Night at World Cafe Live is something like a memory play in retrospect: a dark, quiet, melodious moment filled with subtle theater, distinct shivers of light and (human) spirit and bolts of raw musicality whose every twang and whisper sticks out like a porcupine’s quills. There were ghosts, too, all of whom lived within the sharps and flats of Burnett’s music and the lyrics that haunted his brand of rural country bliss.
Burnett and his friends, who he’s played with for decades—slap bassist Dennis Crouch, mandolinist/fiddler David Mansfield and guitarist Colin Linden—recreated the humble intensity of The Other Side (Verve), the producer/songwriter’s new spare solo album of radiant country blues and open-faced lyrics. More than that, though, Burnett told long humorous stories about the past and present: what it meant to love the two sides of one album, how the internet and phone screens kill connectivity and community, loving the Beatles and penning country songs for Ringo Starr, meeting the woman of his dreams and loving her enough to write her a ballad, his time spent with folk avatar Bob Neuwirth, what it means to settle an unsettled mind, what it is to live through troubled times, past and present. Throughout Burnett’s fireside chat with his raptly attentive audience in low light (and no drinks sold during showtime), he and his fellow musicians created their own wooded-campsite/homey olde-radio-show vibe, acoustically, while huddled together in a cluster, picking and singing. All they needed were burnt marshmallows to complete the picture.
Burnett’s singing voice, a conversational patter connected to his roots in St. Louis and Fort Worth, drifted slowly and clearly atop the insistent churning-combine roll of his musical partners and the immensely hummable likes of “He Came Down” and “Waiting For You.” To go with Burnett’s tactile cinematic feel for a musical moment (this is the guy who composed the bugged-out score for True Detective and won a Grammy for Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?), the ominous “Town That Time Forgot” and the flirty “(I’m Gonna Get Over This) Some Day” were elegantly rendered snapshots of dust and lust with Linden’s guitar work leaping between subtle jump-country licks, acoustic-slide swiping and rumblingly spooky mood-swinging swells of electricity. And that was just the first half.
With drinks bought and consumed during intermission (a jokey Burnett wasn’t fond of tinkling glasses), the second half of the night’s program delved into his past and its often-hidden gems, with the sarcastic, alien-comic blues of “Humans From Earth” (wow, an Until The End Of The World track?!) and oaken marvel “Like A Songbird That Has Fallen” (from Cold Mountain?! WTF), the rainy-night noir of “It’s Not Too Late” (co-written by Neuwirth and Elvis Costello—and followed soon by a gently raucous take on Costello’s own “The Scarlet Tide”) and a genuinely electrifying version of “Hefner And Disney.”
Though the evening ended with a righteous reprise of the song he started with, “He Came Down,” Burnett—a music-biz elder working with more-vital-than-ever octogenarians such as Ringo, Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson—brought his own “gift of a golden voice” to the passionate pain and ardent ache of Leonard Cohen’s funnily funereal “Tower Of Song.” The idea of making someone else’s anthem your own is an overused sentiment, but Burnett and Co.—as they had all night—lit up the spirit of aged traditional country, Texas blues, rustic folk and early rural soul with new-old bold energy and constant instrumental invention.
—A.D. Amorosi
