transformative music left me feeling I’d fallen through a surreal cellar door into Tin Pan Alley. Redbone sold out Friday night and preserved his reputation as one of the quirkiest entertainers ever. His time capsule performance — with a back-up act by Professor Phelyx, a magician/mentalist — evoked vaudeville variety shows.
Redbone sported his handsome trademark yesteryear look: a dark suit and white shirt accessorized with skinny tie, dark glasses, bamboo cane and fedora hat at a jaunty tilt. A cult hero, Redbone smacks of authenticity, albeit from another era.
His singular voice ranges from a low and gravely second bass to a clear sweet tenor, and in between a heart-breaking baritone. Redbone’s crackerjack guitar work was accompanied by a pianist whose name I could not catch due to Redbone’s often unintelligible speech.
Redbone is curious and hilarious. “Good morning, everybody,” he slurred in his whiskey voice once on stage. He held the audience in the palm of his hand as he took his sweet time silently adjusting his shirt cuffs. With his odd brand of humor, he punctuated too many spaces between too few songs. He said several times “That was a sing-along, but I forgot to mention it,” and “I haven’t been well lately.”
But when it comes to his guitar-playing, itap not all clowning around. The mysterious man once rumored to be Andy Kaufman or Frank Zappa, nails intricate riffs. And the dude can whistle like a trilling songbird!
An enigma as much as a crack-up caricature, his schtick can frustrate. Redbone sometimes tickles his own funny bone as much as the audience’s. I would have appreciated less randomness and more Redbone Blues-Jazz-Ragtime in his sleepy, sexy, raspy delivery. The retro music was so mellow and quiet that audience members’ toe-tapping was audible.
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Colleen Smith is the author of “Glass Halo”–a novel selected as a finalist for the Santa Fe Literary Prize — available at Denver bookstores and on Amazon.com.
