Three days of heat, grass, and music

Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2003 01:50:36 GMT
Newsgroups: fa.music.ecto
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This year's Taste of Chicago, the City of Chicago's summer festival of
overpriced food; overcrowding; and free entertainment, afforded me the
rare opportunity to hear three singer-songwriters in as many days, at no
charge. Typologically, the three almost fall into a dialectical
(thesis-antithesis-synthesis) pattern: Maria Hines, a local independent
artist whom I happen to know personally; Sheryl Crow, a national headliner
whom I don't know personally :-); and Alice Peacock, whose name I had
heard before but about whom I knew nothing, and whom I assumed to be an
up-and-coming alternative artist with some national name recognition.
Maria Hines' performance on Friday was by far the best of the three. It
was held at the festival's secondary stage, far from the madding crowd.
Many of the audience toward the front apparently were friends of hers,
whom she recognized from the stage (including me) in the course of her
performance. Maria's music is more unplugged than not, though not
strictly acoustic. Her first number was true sensuality in music--the
kind of thing some people think they're going to get from _Liz Phair_,
though of course they really won't. The rest of her set maintained the
same high artistic standard. Most of it is material written since her
self-published CD came out a couple of years ago, though she performed a
few older selctions toward the end. She certainly has enough good
material for a new album, and I told her so after the show. She told me
she was working on it.
Sheryl Crow's performance on Saturday was already in progress when I
arrived, thanks to conflicting information about the start time. Somehow
I doubt if what I missed was all that different from what I didn't. This
one was at the main stage, with a large crowd; I saw the performance on a
video screen, probably getting a better view than those seated where they
could see the stage with the naked eye. Musically, Crow seemed to be
mostly preaching to the converted, as it were. The set was replete with
Greatest Hits, and what I assume to be other album tracks. A few numbers
deviated from normal radio rock, shading into folk or maybe country;
perhaps unsurprisingly, those are the selections I found most interesting.
The crowd certainly did its fair share of clapping and singing along to
the music. But somehow I doubt that any of them learned anything new,
musically--a stark contrast with Hines' performance the previous day.
I arrived at the main stage on Sunday at the announced start time for
Alice Peacock's set as the opening act for Elvis Costello, but she, too,
had already started. And so the first of the blanks was promptly filled
in: she is a rocker, and a good one. Her lyrics seem more complex, or at
least less high concept, than Crow's. She plays both guitar and
keyboards, and performed a fair number of covers along with her original
material. The audience was more restrained in its applause, etc., than
was Crow's--hopefully a sign of a more serious atitude toward the music.
The set may or may not have been cut short by a brief thundershower that
hit just at the end of one number, a few minutes before Costello was
scheduled to go on. But after a long weekend of free music where Hines'
performance would have been worth twice the price :-), while the price was
right for Crow's performance :-), my brief introduction to Peacock can be
summed up by paraphrasing the old Remington shaver commercials: I was so
impressed, I bought her CD on the way home.
Mitch