THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 7, 1995 TAG: 9505070079
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Music review
SOURCE: BY RICKEY WRIGHT, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 51 lines
Late in the first of his two sets at Harrison Opera House Saturday night, Bruce Hornsby playfully remembered a late-'70s gig at a Janaf Shopping Center restaurant. The Williamsburg native recalled his group's ``trying to get away with as much jazz as we could,'' then illustrated his point with a brief run through the rapidly shifting tempos of Bill Evans' ``TTT.''
Hornsby more than got away with his ambitious solo-piano agenda.
Part sold-out benefit for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and part test of his ever-growing keyboard prowess, the concert must surely have fed the musician's confidence in his skills.
You could see the ever-so-slight abashedness that crossed Hornsby's face for a moment at show's beginning fall away.
By the end of that first set, he was delivering a funky reworking of ``The Valley Road,'' one of his most malleable songs. (A bluegrass version he cut with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band won a Grammy.)
He gleefully stomped out the verses before telling a Springsteenian tall story about ``a chromatic love thing'' that he demonstrated with increasingly rigorous ``out'' playing.
Throughout, Hornsby adventurously explored his palette, often leaping from softer, singer/songwriterly passages to explosions of pianistic frenzy that spoke well of his practice sessions.
While many of the selections were crowd-pleasing favorites from his four albums - Hornsby littered the stage with handfuls of scribbled requests before embarking on the evening's second half - there were also some nice surprises.
``The Country Doctor,'' another dark exploration of the edges of Hornsby's southside, represented the forthcoming ``Hot House'' album. And a medley of his sometime cohorts the Grateful Dead's ``Scarlet Begonias'' and ``Sugaree'' was a highlight of the gig, smartly linking his and their blues leanings.
Hornsby's looser musical approach, which was heralded by 1993's ``Harbor Lights'' disc and the band tours that supported it, has grown even more assured.
When he stretched out even slightly, as he did on ``Rainbow's Cadillac,'' he gave listeners the kind of moment that promises to keep his work much more vital than it had become after his initial triumphs in the mid- to late '80s.
The health of the Bay wasn't the only thing worth celebrating at the Opera House on Saturday night. by CNB