Photo credit: Blaine Schultz
Matt Wilson and his Orchestra
Years ago, when Matt Wilson played his initial post-Trip Shakespeare show in Milwaukee, his band included a vibraphone. Saturday evening’s performance at Shank Hall included a full-size harp played by Phala Tracy. It begged the question: Where does Wilson go from here?
Those clues, in a nutshell, offer a glimpse into Wilson’s imaginative fascination with music. Songwriters too-easily fall into minor-key cynicism, but Wilson’s worldview has always included plenty of light.
His humor and turn of phrase coupled with off-the-wall characters, who really don’t seem out of place in everyday life, are his stock in trade. “Here I sit, a trumpet in a lonely store / ‘What’s the use,’ I wonder, if your lips never come to my horn,” Wilson sang in “I Was Made to Love You Well.”
The drummerless quartet also included Quillan Roe on banjo and vocals and bassist Jacques Wait. The group’s extraordinary sound was powerful but never loud. At times, the rolling banjo propelled the arrangements with Wilson adding harmonic on top to create the aural equivalent of a new Grant Wood painting, Americana Gothic.
Vintage Trip Shakespeare performances left both the audience and band drenched in sweat. This evening was a bit more subdued, not unlike a house concert with a great sound system. Wilson moved easily from acoustic guitar to piano, and his running banter with Roe about the merits of Ice Mountain water lent an air of silliness to the set.
As always, the bespectacled Wilson demonstrated the ability to paint a picture in a few words. In “Descender,” he sang about an obsessed “freshwater Nemo” in a diving bell whose visions revealed “sky full of Stuka dive-bombers, a plane and a pilot from every race / From each nation, there's a redneck cracker with a reason to be fighting for the mother place.”
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Toward the end of the show, Wilson introduced "You're My World" by Italian songwriter Umberto Bindi as one of the greatest songs ever written—and thanked the translator for not wrecking it. The heartfelt ballad could have been a schmaltzy, lounge-cover in lesser hands. With his performance, Wilson joined that rarefied list of artists able to glean both the underlying sentiment and sincerity of the song.
