Two important concerts in one program last night at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam: the bands of Johnny Winter and The Flock . The Texas-born Winter — a very fragile, translucent thin, elegantly moving albino, for whom the guitar must almost be a kind of prosthesis — delivered a concert before the break that lasted well over two hours and stood like a rock-solid house.
Accompanied by a solid backing of bass player, drummer, and a waiter, this youth, still exploring, pushed the Americans with a characteristic rigid flexibility that did not distract from the absence of intensity. Winter's guitar playing is simultaneously surprisingly brutal and as malleable as nearly forged steel.
Winter was most captivating when playing in overly slow numbers, where he occasionally fell completely out of balance, becoming a recurring detail in itself. The benefit, from that moment on, was that he could no longer deviate from a performance, which was mainly obvious to the audience.
His style seems to hark back to that of famous Chicago blues players. He must have inevitably thought of B.B. King . Especially his new LP contains material that is very convincing. His concert in the Concertgebouw became more chaotic toward the end, though it was a particularly successful encounter, where the audience listened breathlessly and ultimately did everything as soon as they started soloing — it was comical. Very skillfully and typically interwoven with tension it was.
The Flock brought, after the break, for an almost full house a very strange show, with an almost awe-inspiring introduction of mainly jazz-oriented guitars, supplemented with rather trivial vocal passages. Only when it became silent, this whole thing faded into nothingness, even though they firmly dug everything into a form of procrastination as content. In comparison, Johnny Winter ’s performance was somewhat diminished.
ELLIE DE WAARD
