Not elementary J. Holmes
I don’t want to be one of those people who go to a piano jazz concert for the first time in their life, trying to seem enthusiastic about an experience of which they’re able to judge very few and shouting to the world how much great it was the performer at issue.
Joel Holmes’s gig in Benevento (I) on the 3rd of August 2014
All I Know about Jazz is what I listened when I was a baby from my father’s LPs. But when I assisted to Joel Holmes’ gig here in Benevento, my little town in the south of Italy, inside the Festival “I concerti della bottega” (the Small Shops’s concerts) it seemed to me like going back to those days on the coach, while Miles playing his trumpet, wondering if I would have ever been so happy again in dad’s company.
Joel is a pianist, actually, but the point is that he made me remember how beautiful Jazz can be when it’s played simply and passionally, without any of those unclean twisting that every time leave me with the same anguishing question: was it me to having not understood for the umpteenth time or this was the ugliest concert ever played?
I couldn’t see his hands from the back places so I became more and more closer to the stage, thanks to the bystanders distraction: those hands were charged through the rhythmical so as ecstatic through the sensitive passages and all the stroll was leaded by Joel’s happy sympathy. I was searching for my licorice and found my handkerchief indeed. And fortunately this was exactly while he was playing “E la chiamano estate”, such as one of his best reinterpretations.
Huge, wonderful, supreme. The best trip I’ve ever had.
If you don’t trust Jazz anymore, try Joel Holmes first: you’ll be rewarded.
