below is a review of tift's recent show. besides being an avid music fan and concert-goer, keith is a friend and fellow lover of music + great reviewer and taper. keith has kindly included a link to his excellent recording of this show, feel free to download and enjoy.
many thanks to keith for sharing his words and recording. and thanks to tift for being "taper friendly" and allowing recordings of her shows. these recordings are for personal use only, feel free to share and trade, but please, respect the artists and tapers wishes and under no circumstances should they be sold or money change hands for these recordings.
I drove up to the Towne Crier Café in Pawling NY from Long Island (about 90 miles) last night to see Tift, having missed her appearance at the Mercury Lounge in NYC some months back because I had to be out of town. I picked up my friend Arlene (who lives in Manhattan) at the Pawling train station at 7:01 and we headed over to the venue to have dinner before the 9:00 show. There was already a pretty good crowd seated near the stage when we arrived at 7:10, but we got a table with a good view about 20 feet from the stage a little left of center.
I had never heard opener Jess Klein, and I gotta say she was absolutely phenomenal! With a plaintive sultry voice and formidable technique on a guitar that's nearly as big as she is, she had the audience absolutely transfixed (myself included). I actually had to loosen loosen my collar during her spine-tingling performance of Willie Dixon's The Same Thing, during which you could have heard a pin drop.
Tift and the boys came on a little after 10:00 and opened with Morning Is My Destination with Tift at the piano. It was a very spirited show, as I've come to expect from Tift by now (I think this was show #8 for me). This was the first time I've seen the band with Scott McCall and I thought he did a really fabulous job on lead. They performed Supposed to Make You Happy unmiked with Jay and Scott turning in beautiful harmonies, and also went off mike for brief but lovely interludes during Keep Me Happy, Broken, Something To Me and When I Cross Over. Tift performed Good Hearted Man solo on the piano (after encouraging the staff to silence the register noisily pumping out the dinner receipts) and they closed with a rousing performance of When I Cross Over. Mille Tendresses was the encore.
By the time the show was over it was about 10 minutes before Arlene's last train back to NYC. I had brought my copy of Another Country for Tift to sign, but a long line had already formed to talk to her when I came out of the men's room and I really couldn't wait. So I just stopped alongside the line across from her and Zeke on our way to the front door and called out "Tift! I have to catch a train, but -- I LOVE YOU!" She flashed me that big smile of hers and reached out her arm through the people standing in front of her, and I squeezed her hand and waved. "Don't miss your train!" she laughed. It was a good moment.
I could say a lot more about the show but a recording is worth a thousand words (and then some), so you can download hi-fi mp3s from this link:
http://kbergend.tripod.com/tm2008-08-09.zip
The house mix wasn't quite as good as other times I've seen Tift perform and there's a bit of clipping during the very loudest parts of the show, but for the most part it sounds pretty nice. I boosted the gain a little on Supposed To Make You Happy to make it more audible. Enjoy!
01 Morning Is My Destination
02 Hopes Too High
03 Stray Paper
04 I Know What I'm Looking For Now
05 Another Country
06 Supposed To Make You Happy (unmiked)
07 Tell Me Something True
08 Keep You Happy
09 My Heart Is Free
10 Ain't Looking Closely
11 Broken
12 Tender Branch
13 Something To Me
14 Good Hearted Man
15 When I Cross Over
[encore]
16 Mille Tendresses
AT943c > Marantz PMD620 @24/44.1
cardreader > USB > Audition 3.0/Ozone 3 > CD Wave > Apple mp3 encoder @192kbps
Editing: gain adjustments, EQ, compression < 120 Hz, MBIT+ dither to 16 bits
also, i checked out jess klein's website(s), the opener for tift that keith mentioned in his review and whoa! do yourself a favor, pop over and give this girl a listen.
jess klein (go to the album page and you can have a free listen)
jess klein - myspace
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