#ken 'willie' scandlyn

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Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit, Shemekia Copeland Live Show Review: 9/22, The Salt Shed, Chicago

BY JORDAN MAINZER

“You don’t open with this one!!!” screamed a fan as Jason Isbell sang the words, “This is how you make yourself vanish into nothing,” the opening lines to Something More Than Free classic “24 Frames”. He had a point. Isbell’s songs are often so emotional that audience members seeing him live feel like they need to be primed into the devastation, instead slowly taking in the chops of his backing band The 400 Unit (guitarist Sadler Vaden, bassist Jimbo Hart, keyboardist Derry deBorja, drummer Chad Gamble). But continuing from his best songs with Drive-By Truckers, Isbell’s last four records (not counting his 2021 covers album Georgia Blue) effectively combine tales of personal triumph with pleas for sociopolitical empathy, and launching right into his most Springsteenian song is straight up fitting at this point.

Best, the instrumentation Thursday at the Salt Shed was still dynamic. Isbell himself is a terrific guitarist, able to rip a blues solo with the best of them on “Something More Than Free” and the Truckers’ “Decoration Day”. Vaden’s electric playing sounded infinitely expansive on “Last of My Kind”, gentle and limber on a self-described “hillbilly style” version of “Tour of Duty”. Gamble swayed between similarly subtle on “Overseas”, thumping and forceful on “Super 8″. deBorja added stadium-sized depth to Southeastern’s biggest tearjerkers, “Cover Me Up” and “Elephant”. Hart, rather than Gamble, was the true backbone, buoying the band when they blasted out from already rollicking song structures on “Hope The High Road” and a Vaden-led cover of Drivin N Cryin’s “Honeysuckle Blue”.

Ultimately, though, Isbell’s most timely tune--and his most explicit foray into heartland rock--is “Be Afraid”, a song that grapples with the importance of country artists specifically speaking out against inequality and other social ills. “We won’t shut up and sing,” he declares, referencing the country music industry and conservative media backlash over The Chicks’ Natalie Maines speaking out against George W. Bush and the Iraq War. The song also harked back a mere hour, to the night’s opener Shemekia Copeland. Before launching into “Pink Turns to Red”, a pro-gun control song from her new album Done Come Too Far (Alligator), Copeland said, “When shit is messed up, we talk about it...At this age, I don’t stray from controversy.” 

Copeland and Isbell are collaborators, the latter playing on the former’s most recent album, but they’re also similar in their ethos. Copeland still writes some songs like popular infidelity pre-revenge tale “It’s 2 A.M.”, but on Done Come Too Far, she continues the spirit of 2018′s America’s Child, prayers for a better world. There are modern day Civil Rights anthems, searing laments about conversations Black parents have with their kids about growing up Black in a world of police racism and brutality, and the continuing struggles for liberty. A song like her new album’s title track fits right alongside Copeland stalwarts like “Ghetto Child”. While the studio version highlights a duet with Cedric Burnside, it didn’t lose it’s slinky wah wahs live, Ken ‘Willie’ Scandlyn busting out yearning solo after solo. Copeland also revealed that Done Come Too Far came out the same day her mom passed away, and she appropriately played “Nobody But You”, a song written by her father Johnny about her mother. Best, though, was “Barefoot in Heaven”, a song she does “cuz it makes me feel good.” A relaxed gospel strut, it sees Copeland imagining--yes--walking through heaven barefoot, rubbing elbows with Sister Rosetta Tharpe, taking it all in. For all of her struggles, that scene is, truly, something more than free.

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Shemekia Copeland & Sammy Miller and the Congregation Live Show Review: 12/16, City Winery Chicago

BY JORDAN MAINZER

For electric blues vocalist Shemekia Copeland, last night’s concert at City Winery was a homecoming and a celebration. Copeland, who long lived in Chicago before recently moving to California, delivered an enrapturing set that showed why she’s been dubbed the new Queen of the Blues for over 10 years now, and more. She was introduced to the stage by 93XRT’s Tom Marker, who remarked that though blues drives everything Copeland does, her actual genre output is far more diverse. That dichotomy is as present as ever on her most recent album Uncivil War (Alligator Records), a 12-song collection of originals and covers that encompasses sociopolitical issues as timely as they are constant. (The album, which was released last October, missing the 2021 Grammy Awards cutoff, has thankfully been nominated for a 2022 Grammy for Best Contemporary Blues Album). As expected, not getting to properly tour Uncivil War at the time of release, Copeland prioritized the record in her setlist, from the ZZ Top strut of “Money Makes You Ugly” and the R&B funk of “Clotilda’s On Fire” to the quietly strummed, powerfully minimal title track and pro-gun control stomp “Apple Pie and a .45″.

It’s been quite a trying two years for Copeland, who shared that she recently was diagnosed with cancer and had 20% of her kidney removed as a result, and then contracted COVID-19, and that her mother was sick for most of last year. She’s on the mend now, though, and her mother and brother were actually able to attend last night’s show. Copeland’s banter with her loved ones in the audience was just as if not more charming than that between her and her formidable band (guitarists Arthur Neilson and Ken “Willie” Scandlyn, bassist Kevin Jenkins, and drummer Robin Gould). Her stories of her childhood, and past and current romantic relationships contextualized older tunes like “Big Brand New Religion” and “It’s My Own Tears”. Tales of church and bible studies with her mom’s friends played off of performances of blues-turned-gospel jams such as “Walk Until I Ride”. At the center of it all was Copeland’s voice, a stunning instrument, that can wail like a blues guitar or emulate the late John Prine’s nasal sneer on her adaptation of his “Great Rain”. And when she performed “Ghetto Child”, a cover of her father Johnny Copeland’s song originally recorded for her 1998 debut Turn the Heat Up, Copeland ended the song singing without the aid of a microphone, her ability to project washing over a crowd stunned to quietude. Queen of the blues, and everything else, too.

Opening for Copeland was collective Sammy Miller and the Congregation, last night a quintet consisting of drummer and bandleader Miller, pianist David Linard, bassist Brandon Rose, trumpeter Alphonso Horne, and trombonist “Tall Sam” Crittenden. Introduced by the venue as “the best jazz band east of the Mississippi and the third best west” of it, the group played warm jazz ditties riddled with tongue-in-cheek flourishes both vocal and instrumental. Though Miller sang a couple self-deprecating tunes about girls and, um, Moses, the band was instrumentally impressive, especially Crittenden’s slow, soulful phrasing in duel with Horne’s blares, Rose’s bass crisscrossing with Miller’s drum patterns. As much as they relished in solos, the band often chose to highlight the interplay between two instruments at a time before returning to full-out jams, an effectively fun tune-up for Copeland’s jubilations.