Stevie Wonder signed, sealed and delivered
Lee Hildebrand, Special to The Chronicle
Monday, July 7, 2008
Although Stevie Wonder was an inexcusable 57 minutes late in arriving on the Shoreline Amphitheater stage Saturday night, the near-capacity crowd of 22,000 quickly forgot the wait as he ripped into a career retrospective that didn't let up for 140 minutes.
During the fast-paced show, which had no opening act or intermission, the 58-year-old musician served up material that stretched from the 1966 smash "Uptight (Everything's Alright)" to "Keep Fooling Yourself, Baby Girl," a new song from an as-yet-unreleased album titled "Through the Eyes of Wonder."
The singer holds the record for having scored the most No. 1 hits on Billboard's R&B chart - 18 in all, from 1963 to 1985 - and he managed to fit a good many into his 27-song performance. Moving between grand piano and clavinet, sometimes pressing a chromatic harmonica to his lips to blow sweetly melodic solos, he applied his multi-octave, melisma-dripping pipes to such favorites as "Master Blaster (Jammin')," "Higher Ground," "Living for the City," "Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I'm Yours," "Sir Duke," "I Wish" and "Superstition."
The band - a powerhouse ensemble of 10 instrumentalists and three vocalists - was a remarkably cohesive unit anchored by bassist Nathan Watts and drummer Stanley Randolph's throbbing, interlocking 4/4 grooves. They remained faithful to the original recordings' arrangements on most selections. Some, however, were given fresh twists, notably "Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing," which was treated to a cha-cha beat and turned into full-tilt salsa as Munyungo Jackson and Fausto Cuevas churned up a torrent of polyrhythms on congas and timbales, and trumpeter Dwight Adams and saxophonist Ryan Kilgore riffed furiously. The background singers, including Wonder's daughter Aisha Morris, also got into the Latin swing of things with their fancy footwork.
Morris, 33, was given the solo spotlight by her dad for "I'm Gonna Laugh You Right Out of My Life," a ballad written by Cy Coleman and Joseph Allen McCarthy that is most commonly associated with Nancy Wilson. Seated on a bench next to Wonder, who supplied jazz-style accompaniment on piano, Morris caressed the song in breathy alto tones, her relaxed phrasing filled with warm sustains, evoking Diana Ross.
The evening's most poignant moment followed, as Wonder performed "Isn't She Lovely," which he had written for his daughter when she was an infant. While he sang the lilting lullaby, she stood by his side, beaming.
Toward the end of the concert, Wonder's 6-year-old son, Kailand Morris, joined the band at the front of the stage for several selections on a tiny set of electric drums, though he managed only to keep a rudimentary beat.
Wonder involved the adoring audience in many of his songs throughout the evening. Often they sang along spontaneously. Sometimes, he dictated their parts. After pitting men against women in a round of call-and-response scatting, he had them all sing the line "I love you, I la-la-la-la-la-la love you." Against this rhythmic choral riff, he sang the Thom Bell/Linda Creed-penned Stylistics classic "People Make the World Go Round" through a synthesized voice processor. It was one of the evening's few numbers not written by Wonder himself, and it served as a perfect segue into "Higher Ground," which opens with the words, "People keep on learnin'."
Another surprise was "Concierto de Aranjuez," written by Joaquin Rodrigo and popularized by Miles Davis. Wonder played the opening strains of the melody on harmonica, with Victoria Theodore echoing his lines on piano, before the whole band tore into a rapid-fire samba that served as a launching pad for solos by every member, including choruses by the leader on both harmonica and piano.
Although notorious for being long-winded, Wonder kept his verbal remarks to a relative minimum Saturday. He did, however, briefly mention Barack Obama, whose candidacy he has endorsed.
Wonder also mentioned his mother, Lula Mae Hardaway, who died in May 2006. He did not explain that seeing her in a dream had inspired him to end a 12-year hiatus from touring and get back on the road last fall. Allowing his legions of fans to again experience his monumental body of music in person is one of the most welcome developments on the current concert scene.
This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
reprinted from the SFGate website
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