Samamidon – Live at the Bowery, Edinburgh, Sunday 11th January 2009
Samamidon – Wild Bill Jones (Live at the Bowery, Edinburgh) from Song, by Toad on Vimeo. If this is loading too slowly, click the little ‘HD is On’ button on the right of the picture and it will turn of High Definition, which should be a lot faster.
This live review is mostly going to contain video footage. Partly because I reviewed a live Samamidon performance at this very venue really quite recently, and partly because the videos will explain so much better what I actually have to say myself.
When Samanidon plays it reminds me how narrow our perception of music and the performance of music can become. As he plays, Sam interrupts the songs with asides, surreal anecdotes, bits of other songs, and all manner of other bits and pieces. Maybe it’s because in the folk traditions in which he was raised, where the music is frequently part of the conversation, not some separate, sacrosanct entity to be treated with kid gloves and a false sense of idolatry, but I can’t speak for him on that score.
Neil from Meursault suggested that his unpredictable conversational detours actually fit quite well with the way he plays the fiddle – as rooted in free jazz as in the traditional reels he uses it to explode so brilliantly. The anchor for all this eccentricity is provided by the simple loveliness of his reinterpretations of old folk tunes, almost as if there is only so much uncertainty we can collectively cope with.
As live shows go, his is one of my favourite. That knack for bringing the audience to the verge of nervous giggles every once in a while, before plunging them back into the cooling balm of gently plucked banjo and his wonderfully cracked voice, creates a kind of emotional dynamic over the evening that would never expect from something as simple as a young lad playing folk songs on his own all night.
Have a look at the videos below to see what I am on about. I’d recommend O Death and Wild Bill Jones for the loveliness, and A-Roving on a Winter’s Night and Fiddle Improv for the more unusual side of the performance. There’s one more song – Sugar Baby, from his latest album All is Well – posted on both the Song, by Toad Vimeo page and on the YouTube page. Oh, and as the embedded videos are in HD format they will take a while to load, but if this is proving tedious, just click on the ‘HD is On’ icon on the right of the picture and it should go a lot quicker.
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Samamidon – Fiddle Improv. (Live at the Bowery, Edinburgh) from Song, by Toad on Vimeo.
Samamidon – O Death (Live at the Bowery, Edinburgh) from Song, by Toad on Vimeo.
Samamidon – A-Roving on a Winter’s Night (Live at the Bowery, Edinburgh) from Song, by Toad on Vimeo.
Fecking Vimeo. Should be sorted out pretty soon, folks, sorry about that. Had to pay them money and re-upload so that they could all be in HD. Still it’ll be worth it. Just have a look at the full screen version of Wild Bill Jones.
It was a great performance. I was trying to describe the happily haphazard pick’n'mix of different performance styles to Euan the next day, and I said it was almost something you’d expect from one of the old wild west travelling snake-oil shows. Maybe it was the low level lighting and the intimate atmosphere, but the show seemed to invoke the mood of sitting around a campfire out on the trail, silly as that sounds.
The interruptions, anecdotes, jokes, odd dances and theatrics should have distracted from the performance of the songs, but instead the different aspects of the show all melted into a homogenous, irresistable whole.
You know how when you get in late at night after the pub and you’re hungry and a bit drunk. So you stick a pan on the hob and throw a few things in with a pinch of this, and a splash of that, and half-a-tin of something leftover in the fridge and give it a good stir; and the you don’t know how to describe what you’ve made or what to call it – but it’s delicious and yet you know you’ll never be able to make it again? Well that’s what a Sam Amidon show was like.
Yes, I’ve nailed it; a Sam Amidon show is just like mixing a bunch of random ingredients in a saucepan over a campfire out on the trail in the old wild west, and it’s great.
Something you simply have to experience for yourself.
Oh, there will be photos over at Blueback Hotrod shortly, folks! Watch this space!
(I haven’t seen my camera since Sunday night – it’s been temporarily adopted by some kindly foster parents.)
Kindly?
Ruth and Chris are kindly.
Yes they are. But our cat isn’t.
(Don’t worry, it’s out of his reach!)
Those movies turned out well on that camera, don’t you think? It will be steadier with a monopod and I used an aggressively efficient codec to compress them before uploading, so they can be way sharper than that in future. Nice picture though, even with the lack of light in the Bowery.
Dammit! I wish I’d been there. I suppose he’ll come back to the good ol’ US of A one of these days, but I’m burning with envy. Little did I guess when I reviewed his record back in the Spring that you bastards would get to see him (twice!) before I had the chance. Not fair.
Well he seems, as you can tell from that first video, to be quite taken with Edinburgh. And we’ll have him back as often as he wants to come, frankly. Or we could do a swap for the Builders & the Butchers. Or Sam Crain. Or Loch Lomond.
ace ace ace ace ace ace ace ace!
Oh…. *speechless adoration
Photos are up on Bluebakc Hotrod. (Finally..)
Damn it. Missing him twice really was a bit annoying.
Mate, you missed the Toad Session as well!
[...] day after his amazing live set at the Bowery, Sam Amidon came round to the house to record a Toad Session. He didn’t have all that much [...]