Pop Music Review : Brown’s Keeping His Blues in Good Form

Planning your entertainment schedule early? Why not flip your calendar ahead to 2041 and mark down Eddie Vedder’s 50th anniversary in show biz. It’ll warm everyone’s cockles to hear him singing “I’m still alive” in his 70s. Heck, it’ll warm my cockles if I’m still alive.

For the impatient among us, 2012 looks like a good target date: Mick and Keith, 50 years together.

Those prospective golden-anniversary celebrations will be well worth seeing if they have half the musical vitality and personal charm that Charles Brown exudes after a half-century as a professional blues man.

Brown joined his first major band, Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers, in 1944. He observed his 50th anniversary by releasing two quality albums in 1994: “Just a Lucky So & So” and “These Blues,” plus a holiday CD, “Charles Brown’s Cool Christmas Blues.”

The singer-pianist’s exuberant and supremely skillful concert Wednesday night at the Coach House showed no slackening as he heads into Year 51. (Among major blues figures, only John Lee Hooker has been at it longer professionally, and Brown’s first chart hit with the Three Blazers in 1946 beat Hooker’s national arrival by three years.)

Brown’s show rollicked and swung quite a bit--a surprise considering that his signature is a smooth, urbane, ballad-oriented style that often calls for adding a bluesy hue to pop and jazz standards. Maybe, at 72, Brown was proving a point.

He played the age card willingly during a 14-song set that found him playing or singing continuously for almost 100 minutes. More than once he mentioned his age, and what septuagenarian wouldn’t if he looked as good as Brown?

He was memorably turned out in a satiny white suit with brown sleeves and lapels, and his long, smiling, still-smooth face peered from under a quasi-military billed cap that had a gilded shine.

Brown, a winningly gracious figure, spoke from the vantage point of experience in noting the lost romanticism of the ‘40s, the period when he sang, and often wrote, a streak of R & B hits.

He alluded at one point to his years of “dormancy”: an almost biblical span of 38 years passed between 1952, when Brown’s hit streak ended with the prophetically titled “Hard Times,” and 1990, when he came back into the spotlight helped by the patronage--no, homage is the better word--of Bonnie Raitt.

If there is any bitterness in Brown at having spent those years of career “dormancy” removed from the spotlight, it doesn’t show. There was only the pride he takes in the past, and the pleasure he has in the present. As Brown put it at one point, what counts is “not what we used to do, it’s what we do today.”

What he did Wednesday was set a vigorous, up-tempo pace from the opening song, “I Stepped in Quicksand.” More than an hour and half later, his energy hadn’t flagged a bit as he encored with a pulsating boogie-woogie instrumental.

In between, Brown did offset the faster-paced songs with a number of ballads, ranging from the cottony, romantic “Sweet Slumber,” to his signature accounts of desolation, “Driftin’ Blues” and “Black Night.” On those, Brown’s conversational voice was emphatic and direct, without straining for effect--he’s not of the keen-and-moan school of blues singing.

Each song featured liberal soloing, and for good reason. Brown got a glistening, bright tone from his grand piano, but he could jab down chords with punchy force as he sparked a band that was primed to swing.

There was no drop-off in musicianship when guitarist Danny Caron or saxophonist Clifford Solomon stepped forward. Caron’s playing had a clean sparkle to it, yet often bristled with rocking energy that showed on his pliant face and in his unrestrained body English.

Solomon’s demeanor was reserved, but he was an audacious musical presence, fluent yet biting, and in perpetual command of a deliciously rich, full tone. Ruth Davies, on upright bass, and drummer Shep Shepherd, who proved a spirited fill-in for Brown’s regular band member, Gaylord Birch, offered sinew and sensitivity as the moment demanded.

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Like Magic Johnson, Brown was not only wondrously gifted at his calling, but visibly enthralled with it as well. As his accompanists soloed, the bandleader looked like the most delighted fan in the house, often looking on in open-mouthed glee. Occasionally he let out a leonine purr of pleasure in reaction to what was being played.

It all put a palpable charge into a half-capacity audience, who may have come away suspecting that Brown not only had drunk the elixir of youth, but that he had served his crowd an invigorating draught of it as well.

Will Brady, the veteran Laguna Beach singer-guitarist whose career stretches back to the 1960s, didn’t settle for the usual blues thing in his second-billed, solo-acoustic slot.

Brady’s material diverged from standard themes. One highlight was a clever novelty number about a particular kind of sugar craving--”I got these Oreo cream sandwich, chocolate-covered, cream-filled cookie blues,” he sang.

Another promising song was a heartfelt, folk-R & B hybrid in which Brady gently implored God to create bigger hearts in humankind, so as to help mankind out of its mire of heartless behavior. In an attention-getting, set-opening gambit, Brady did a nice job recasting Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Great Balls of Fire” as a blues song.

Brady’s impatience with blues commonplaces extended to his determination to avoid, or at least push beyond, the lexicon of standard guitar licks. Almost every song--except for a winsome encore instrumental--found him flying off in busy, circuitous solos full of jazzy flights and fast, percussive picking.

It was certainly different, and certainly kinetic, but Brady’s soloing style is an acquired taste that might go down better if he would sometimes complement his thin, metallic, fast-buzzing sound with a rounder, more wood-grained tone.

The Jake Richmond Band opened with a short set of well-wrought but unremarkable electric blues. The Orange County band did an enthusiastic and thoroughly respectable job with the expected shuffles and funky blues, but nothing in Richmond’s material or temperate vocals had the personality to stand out from the teeming crowd of competent blues yeomen. The set’s best number was a slide-guitar instrumental tinged with sultry mystery, along the lines of “Black Magic Woman.”