August, 2008 By Brett Milano
New Orleans groove suits British-born Cleary well
You
know exactly what to expect whenever anyone strikes up the opening riff
to Professor Longhair’s “Go to the Mardi Gras,” right?
Not quite. That riff opens Jon Cleary’s first live CD, and what
follows is anything but a traditional version of the song. Instead of
charging into the familiar groove, his Absolute Monster Gentlemen dance
around it. Their arrangement is full of spooky open spaces, and Cleary’s
vocal is more about longing for a celebration than being in the thick
of one. It’s a seasoned soul man’s take on the lyric (a slight
change of wording, to “going home to New Orleans,” adds some
post-2005 subtext). It’s no small feat to turn one of the most-covered
songs in New Orleans history into a personal statement.
This is far more idiosyncratic live album than Cleary would have made five years ago, when his Gentlemen were a straight-ahead funk quartet. On his last album Pin Your Spin and the follow-up EP Do Not Disturb, Cleary added a bit of low-fi indie sound and studio abstraction, mixing some Radiohead influence with his Fess and Meters. He’d mastered New Orleans music sufficiently to let his English instincts back into the mix, and while those releases were less satisfying than Cleary’s funk discs, he was onto something.
And in this live setting, the new approach works great. His current Gentlemen are a suppler outfit than the old one, able to handle reggae-ish grooves and the film-noir ambiance of “Port Street Blues.” The covers here are among the most obvious, but played in non-obvious ways. “Tipitina” breaks down halfway through to nothing but a bassline, strummed guitar and cowbell; it’s a live dub version that hits the Caribbean when Cleary re-enters on piano. Likewise “People Say,” which is inevitably a heavy barnstormer when the Funky Meters play it, takes a left turn into Jerry Lee Lewis territory. He does a similar transformation with his own “C’mon Second Line,’ whose elegant midsection turns a party song into a dream sequence.
Cleary also knows when to leave well enough alone, as he does with the funk on the title track and soul on “Help Me Somebody,” the latter as strong a vocal performance as he’s yet recorded. But Cleary generally leaves in enough of his own quirks to make something modern out of the music he loves—and dare we suggest it, a record that would sound terrific on the radio.
