Hot Tuna, featuring former Jefferson Airplane members Jack Casady (black shirt) and Jorma Kaukonen (white shirt), rendered its blues acoustically at the Paramount Theatre on Friday. Photo from .
While the blues really hit popular consciousness under the influence of electric instruments, played by virtuosos from B.B. King through Eric Clapton and on to Stevie Ray Vaughan, at its heart, the blues is acoustic-based. , a band that rose from the ashes of the Jefferson Airplane, switched mainly to acoustic music in the 1990s, and the San Francisco veterans brought their rootsy set to the on Friday night.
Hot Tuna is, at its heart, longtime friends and collaborators Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Cassady, who played together as teenagers before they joined the Airplane. Kaukonen and Cassady project a comfortableness with each other onstage that comes from playing together for so long. You get the sense that no matter where either one decides to take a jam, the other is ready with the perfect part for it.
On many of their recent tours, they have been joined by mandolin player Barry Mitterhoff, who brings a unique instrumentation to Hot Tuna’s blues-based sets. In fact, Mitterhoff at times overshadowed Kaukonen.
Though the Paramount was probably only half to two-thirds full, the audience lapped up Kaukonen’s nimble fingerpicking and Mitterhoff’s deft strumming. The trio opened with “Blue Railroad Train,” an old Doc Watson tune, which set an appropriate tone for the night. While the blues proved the foundation of the music, Mitterhoff often veered into bluegrass stylings on his solos, and it struck me that the set would go perfectly up at the Planet Bluegrass Ranch in Lyons.
Kaukonen’s voice has a timeless quality to it, and it was well-used on “I See the Light,” a bouncy tune that Cassady underscored with a simple, but ominous, bass line. Kaukonen, who had been restrained till that point, finally cut loose on the guitar, adding a beautifully smooth solo.
The highlight of the set was the band’s take on the traditional tune “Good Shepherd.” Mitterhoff played a brilliant solo after the first break, making excellent use of harmonics. Cassady also got a chance to strut his stuff, playing high on the neck of his bass to great effect. After the song, Kaukonen joked about having the two repeat their parts.
The crowd reserved their greatest applause for “Hesitation Blues,” an oft-covered traditional blues, late in the set. Cassady took over the song with a booming bass solo, while Mitterhoff’s weeping mandolin lines meshed well with Kaukonen’s aching voice.
The setlist for the evening was short on some classics, leaving the audience wanting for “Water Song” and Kaukonen’s brilliant solo piece “Embryonic Journey,” but played an encore of “Another Man Done a Full Go Round.”
Hip folkster opened the show, bringing his unique blend of humor to bear on a song called “Unfriendly Skies,” about a baggage handler in Durango who damaged his Martin D28. Wainwright spent much of the evening exploring protest folk in its classic form, whether on “Times is Hard,” a song about our recent economic struggles that could have been written by Woody Guthrie, to the humorous “Krugman’s Blues,” about New York Times’ columnist Paul Krugman.
Candace Horgan is a Denver writer and photographer and regular contributor to Reverb.
