Garth Hudson
At the Top o' the Senator
in Toronto on Tuesday
Keyboardist Garth Hudson shuffled into the Top o' the Senator in Toronto on his unsteady gait for a six-night residency with nothing to prove. He's been a kind and generous sideman to many more famous than him, including Grammy-Award winning vocalist Norah Jones.
But his Tuesday show was not so much a performance, as an extended and overly indulgent boogie-woogie/Tin Pan Alley jam that lurched from piano to synthesizer to accordion like a pickup truck with intermittent brakes. Hudson managed to keep it on the road, but just barely, with the help of his vocalist wife, Maud Hudson.
The 65-year-old veteran sideman found fame with the rock-and-roots legends The Band, spawned in Toronto as the Hawks under the iron fist of the iconoclastic Ronnie Hawkins. Only a block away from the Top o' the Senator is where Friar's Tavern once stood, where the Hawks first gunned the amps on a restless Bob Dylan in 1965, a meeting that would shake up the stodgy folk world.
Hawkins is a taskmaster famous for horsewhipping his members into utter submission. Had he seen Hudson on Tuesday, the Hawk might have been tempted to lay an Arkansas ass-kicking on his former protégé, such was his disdain for discipline and showmanship. It was an ugly display, mitigated only by Hudson's lovable, curmudgeonly banter, but even that got tiresome after the first hour.
The first of Hudson's two sets began in Tom Waits fashion, with Hudson pounding out a succession of cabaret-troubadour flourishes on the grand piano, improvising at will with no sense of direction or timing. Hudson has always parked on the fringes of the avant-garde as a performer, but a little respect for the audience would have been in order.
Hudson's drawl, picked up over decades as a resident of Woodstock, N.Y., hides a vicious wit, hamming up a segment of God Bless America by adding "and God Bless Canada, too," before uttering, "I ought to send this to Nashville. The writers down there will take it further." The only identifiable song from start to finish was My Old Kentucky Home, making it clear that Hudson has no need for set lists.
It wasn't long before Hudson resembled an oddball uncle in front of his adoring, yet exceedingly patient, family at Christmas. The 50 fans politely chuckled and applauded as he muffed chords and timing for cheap laughs. I would have expected a little more for the $20 cover than the autistic haze Hudson could pull off in his rec room any night of the week.
Order was brought to the table in the second set as Maud Hudson joined her husband on stage. Wrapped in a pair of earthy shawls and perched in a wheelchair due to back trouble, Maud struck the stoic figure of a Queen Victoria of the Catskills. She had her own odd habits, such as a laptop requirement, presumably to follow her husband's sprawling jazz arrangements.
Maud, who was much more focused, captured the smouldering torch of Ann Ronell's 1932 Willow Weep for Me, bringing a desperately needed groove to guide the manic Hudson. He was not finished branching off into Gershwin medleys, synthesized oriental skirmishes or accordionized East European celebrations, but with much less indulgence, perhaps proving that, like all overly creative men, he needs a good wife around to keep him in line.
The Hudsons were eloquent jazz interpreters of Bob Dylan's Blind Willie McTell, and brought the temperature up with the country-gospel testimonial Stand by Me, before ending off with a sombre interpretation of the Band's hit The Weight.
But wading through Garth Hudson's myriad of tangents and eccentricities requires more patience than most audiences should be forced to give.
Garth Hudson plays the Top o' the Senator in Toronto until Sunday.