Dueling ND Artists of the Decade in Richmond

A three-hour drive up the road afforded the opportunity to catch both Alejandro Escovedo (the No Depression print magazine’s artist of the decade for the 1990s) and Buddy Miller (our artist of the decade for the 2000s, in our final print issue) on the same night, at different venues, in Richmond, Virginia. So I took it.

Timing turned out to be a little tricky, as both shows were early-starts; thus, I ended up seeing Alejandro’s first set and part of his second at the impressive Virginia Museum of Fine Art, and then drove ten minutes up the road to the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden in time to catch Buddy playing guitar with Patty Griffin (but I missed Buddy’s own set, as well as that of bonus opener Scott Miller). All in all, though, a very enjoyable night out, if a little unusual to be replacing bar-hopping with museum-and-garden-hopping.

Escovedo has a new record coming out later this month, as you may know. Buddy and Patty, once they finish this tour, will shortly be teaming up again on the road, as part of Robert Plant’s new Band Of Joy ensemble (along with Darrell Scott and a couple other folks whose names unfortunately escape me at the moment). Buddy mentioned another intriguing project that’s also in the works, though the album apparently won’t be out until early 2011: It’s called (if I recall correctly) the Majestic Silver Strings and includes Miller, Bill Frisell, Marc Ribot and Greg Leisz, joined by a variety of guest vocalists.

The museum gig — apparently the first in the newly reopened and beautifully reconstructed Virginia Museum Of Fine Art — proved a bit of a challenge for Escovedo at first, in terms of finding the right tone to strike in a large open atrium with white walls and glass enclosures and skybridges and stairways. He played two or three ballads in the middle of his first set, probably presuming that quieter stuff might better suit the venue; but he eventually realized that the way to make this work was just to contrast the stateliness of the setting with the hard edges in his music. So he pulled out “Everybody Loves Me” and “Castanets” and the Stones’ “Beast Of Burden”, and that’s when everything finally seemed to click.

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Written by Peter Blackstock – nodepression.com