Sunday, May 25, 2008

Tift Merritt & Will Hoge


Last night I had the good fortune to be able to check out 2 acts previously unknown to me. Grammy nominated artist Tift Merritt, who hails from North Carolina, brought her solo show to Paris. The singing, songwriting, guitar/piano woman playing musician is a gifted musician and a firecracker of a performer. Tift, with heavily accented French interludes, warmed the hearts and totally charmed the crowd of around 80+ folks in the nice La Java venue. She sang a collection of all original material from her past CD’s as well as some new tunes from her new (and written pretty much in Paris according to her web site) American release Another Country. (The song Broken from that record is a great song BTW!).
She’s an energetic and dynamic performer, switching back and forth from electric piano to acoustic guitar and she often stepped away from the microphone to give us intimate “unplugged” sessions (on the guitar) much appreciated by the audience. Overcoming some small technical problems early on with a positive professional attitude (meaning she didn’t let it slow the show down!), she treated us all to a remarkably warm and friendly evening of fine, light acoustic music here in the City of Light.
The show was opened by Nashville living, guitar toting, husky-voiced singing, gum-chomping, innocuous songwriter Will Hoge in a too long (by about 30 minutes) set. Please excuse my harshness here but he “had” the audience for about 20 minutes. 40 minutes later it had gone totally the other direction and folks were yawning, looking at their watches and talking. Better too little then too much for opening acts (until you learn better)!
Bookerfatzs2
Photo: Bookerfatzs2 – Tift Merritt – La Java, Paris – May 21, 2008

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posted by leaky sparrow at 4:12 PM 3 comments

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