By Dave Read – Now this was more like it – an unannounced young hard-working musician added to the bill for a concert by a band called Squeeze in the Koussevitsky Music Shed at Tanglewood, a bill that already boasted the Mavericks, with chastened former maverick Raul Malo included in tonight’s nonet from Nashville.
We mention that this band with a heavy Latin accent is based in the home of American county music because a mere four days earlier, the guest conductor who led the Boston Symphony Orchestra in their annual summertime swansong, Beethoven’s Ninth, Giancarlo Guerrero, a native of Nicaragua, is music director of the Nashville Symphony, with which august outfit the Mavericks have shared a program!
Too often these “popular artist” programs are nostalgia trips featuring groups that once were hard-working bands but have long since become franchises that attract audiences eager to reprise that brief shining moment – high school. If you want to see something funny, come to one and watch these incurious people attempting adolescent choreography with their imminent heart attack bodies.
Musical artists are restless people who keep moving from one unique project to the next one. Popular artists are fidgety by comparison; in concert, they are more likely to tweak an act resembling the one that got them up onto the big stage in the first place. They have become faithful keepers of some golden goose. So hooray for the young musician who ignored a nearly empty Shed and cut loose for her first time on the big stage. This is for certain – she’d look insane doing the same act at seventy five!
This was a Mavericks show for us, largely because an old pal took us to see Malo in concert at the estimable Iron Horse some years ago, and we wanted to repay the favor. The advance PR described Squeeze as emerging from the second British invasion. That would put them beyond our curiosity; we’ve been burned – er, given a splitting earache, by attending shows by unknowns; by hanging around to learn what all the fuss is about.