Jazz Aspen was more than just Wilco, but they were brilliant | Reverb — Reverb Music

Live review: Wilco, DeVotchKa, the Court Yard Hounds, Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings and more at the 20th annual Jazz Aspen @ Snowmass Village

By Jeremy Simon, Nick Chambers and Nick Chambers | September 7th, 2010 | No Comments »

Wilco played a particularly fiery set in Snowmass Village on Friday night as part of Jazz Aspen's 20th anniversary celebration. Photo by John Hendrickson, denverpost.com/reverb

Jazz Aspen Snowmass, a polished jewel of a festival in the pocket of prosperity, provided sublime fodder for the rest of us on a beautiful weekend. We made the first two days of the three-day festival.

DAY 1:

Headliner Wilco played a typically restless and outstanding set on Friday evening, mixing ’70s-style rock and country with modern uneasiness and shards of sonic ambiguity.

Wilco established this restlessness in the set’s first two songs. Opening with “Wilco (The Song),” Jeff Tweedy (toting guitar with owls on the strap, his own hair a tousled bird’s nest) played one of three guitars and assuringly sang “Wilco will love you, baby.” If you missed the wink-wink allusion to band-as-cure-all on the recording, you couldn’t miss that suggestion here as computerized voices interrupted the song to flatly intone “John Stirratt” … “Nels Cline” … naming the band members as if in the opening credits to a how-to video.

Having established a mindless, feel-good vibe, Wilco immediately smashed it with “Ashes of American Flags.” I recently heard a former Poet Laureate mock the idea that lyrics alone can be poetry and I won’t spoil our poets’ inch of turf, but as a lament for an American dream beyond reach, set against languid music that boils with tension, “Ashes of American Flags” underscores its own lyric, “I wonder why we listen to poets, and nobody gives a f**k,” and poetically counters the opener’s concept — that answers are easy and just around the corner.

Wilco’s set featured many such point/counterpoint moments — if fewer that lent themselves to musings about meaning, then at least some that changed the musical temperature. The band would play musically direct melodies such as “Company in My Back” that lulled crowd members into states of swaying bliss, and followed them either with dense buckets of alienation (“I Am Trying to Break Your Heart”) or bombastic drum assaults and synthesized bedlam (which blitzed the mellow “Via Chicago,” which Tweedy sang sweetly through as if oblivious to the surrounding storm).

Wilco works for this festival because of these multiple levels of engagement — the complexity and innovation that allows the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Jazz Aspen Snowmass to claim its high-minded mission and draw younger locals and Front Rangers, and the easy entertainment for the baby-boomer elites. Tweedy indicated his own demographic preference by orchestrating a “sing-off” between the cordoned general-admission throng and the sparsely populated, $1,000-plus-pass VIP section. (Such commoner-vs.-elite references are a storied Snowmass tradition.)

But Wilco transcended petty class warfare. As lead guitarist Nels Cline cranked through his thousandth impossible variant of the solo for “Impossible Germany,” you felt this band could manipulate people’s emotions, as the opening song wryly suggested, as if turning on a switch. And you loved them for it.

Both openers played good sets with sensibilities that broached mariachi and went further. DeVotchKa’s propulsive gypsy vibe is familiar to Denver fans, staying on the true side of what could feel like kitsch in less-adept hands, and Calexico’s alt-country portents of doom should be.

DAY 2:

As I boarded the shuttle to the free parking lot at Jazz Aspen Snowmass after the Court Yard Hounds’ set (parking within 3 miles of the concert site costs $20, but I don‘t blame ’em given the vista) the guy next to me, wearing artifacts that betrayed his political persuasion, said, “Natalie should have just kept her big mouth shut.”

He was describing Dixie Chicks lead singer Natalie Maines, who was absent Saturday as bandmates and sisters Emily Robison and Martie Maguire performed as the Court Yard Hounds. Court Yard Hounds is described as a side project; there have been no definitive statements about the band’s future, but Natalie hasn’t been in the studio with her “bandmates“ in five years and has no public plans to.

There’s not much terrible you’d want to say about Emily and Martie. You feel bad thinking about the prospect. After all, it was Natalie who splintered the Dixie Chicks’ fan base in 2003 by publicly expressing shame about then-president George W. Bush. And Emily and Martie, however much they agreed with Natalie, dealt with more fallout than they’d surely sought, having worked their tails off for 14 years (longer than Natalie) to develop the Chicks’ fan base (which included a few Republicans) and outstanding reputation for bluegrass-inflected pop-country.

So there we were Saturday, we audience and Emily and Martie … and the other five Court Yard Hounds members … and there’s little else to say.

The Court Yard Hounds played a raft of songs from their new album, and fewer of the Dixie Chicks’ own classics; nothing from “Taking the Long Way,” the Dixie Chicks’ most recent. Robison and Maguire bore the same sublime voices they’ve always had — I’d say “radio-ready” but they’re better — and the country-rock tunes were easy to smile about in the Snowmass sunlight.

Those songs just didn’t stay long: They came and went like clouds, despite lyrics with a bit of grit and heart. (Robison described the new album from stage as a “divorce album:” she was referring to her marriage, not the Dixie Chicks.) The seven-piece band was too much: I can’t say what two or three of the band members were doing except bloating the sound, and concealing the lack of bite from Robison and Maguire.

The Court Yard Hounds will be a decent holdover for anyone desperate for new Dixie Chicks. But while Natalie may have a “big mouth,” we still need her big voice.

I missed headliners Glenn Frey and Joe Walsh. What could I say of relevance about these guys at this juncture? They could be the Aspen Chamber Resort Association house band. Sharon Jones, on the other hand, is from Georgia, and was a corrections officer at Riker’s Island, and was demonstrably happy to be in Snowmass as Saturday’s first opener. Jones fronted a nine-piece retro-soul band reminiscent of Motown/Stax-era acts, but to the uninitiated, they did exactly what they appeared to do: respect and elevate an extraordinary woman and singer.

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Jeremy Simon is a Lafayette freelance writer and regular contributor to Reverb.