London, Royal Festival Hall, 13 Sep 1996
Live John Martyn Royal Festival Hall
John Martyn has been playing the South Bank since the late Sixties, even though he's never quite seemed at home there.
John Martyn has been playing the South Bank since the late Sixties, even though he's never quite seemed at home there.
They started out like an efficient bar-room band, with a burst of R&B and a dip into the back catalogue, all given heavy-handed treatment thanks to their second drummer but enlivened, briefly, by the mysterious arrival on stage of John Martyn.
By selecting Philadelphia's accomplished, neo-jazzy Huffamoose as accompanists for his current East Coast tour, British singer-songwriter John Martyn signaled he was still searching, after 20 years, for musicians sophisticated enough to enrich his austere folk-blues songs.
We had come, most of us, to pay homage to and enjoy the results of a 26-year career, spanning 21 albums.
Pop and Jazz in Review
By JON PARELES
The blues is a touchstone for John Martyn. In the blues, he found music that transmutes pain into beauty, music that initiates select listeners into a secret world of loneliness and danger. But he didn't become one more blues imitator. Instead, he forged a highly individual style from British folk songs, jazz, soul and his own eccentricities: music with pinpoint syncopated vamps under hazy, free-form vocals, in songs that contemplate death and mourn lost love.
John Martyn gamely moans, grimaces and jokes through his set to widespread indifference, weaving long, serene workouts which seem to drift on past the lifespans of most of the smaller arthropods.
UDEN - De Schotse zanger/gitarist John Martyn weet zich al enkele decennia zonder noemenswaardige hitsuccessen verzekerd van een vast publiek.
John Martyn arrived on stage in Telford last night on a six-string and a prayer.