Indy Acoustic Cafe Series: Jonathan Edwards hits a home run

Jonathan Edwards delivered a rousing finish to the current season of the Indy Acoustic Cafe Series Saturday, with a show that had spectators smiling, swooning, in awe and hootin' and hollerin' at all the right moments.

The show, at the Wheeler Arts Community in the Fountain Square cultural district of Indianapolis, was the seventh of the season that began last November and included -- with a few double bills -- performances by 12 artists, if you include Shawn Mullins' sidekick Patrick Blanchard and Craig Fuller's son Patrick. Also appearing this season were James House, Griffin House, Vance Gilbert, Callaghan, Catie Curtis, Jessi Curtis and Ellis Paul. Neither of the Houses nor Curtises is related, by the way.
 
Like many artists who appear in the series and who travel the country and globe performing before intimate audiences, Jonathan Edwards flirted with significant fame at least once in his career -- his 1971 single "Sunshine" was a Top 40 Billboard hit -- before settling down to a busy, less commerce-driven lifestyle. The sense of humility and appreciation of people's enjoyment of the craft exhibited Saturday has been a hallmark of almost all the performers I've seen at the Wheeler in the long-running series.

Edwards' show Saturday was packed with self-deprecation, storytelling, a brief explanation for why he was performing barefoot (he joked that his shoes were confiscated by airport security); a sharp wit and playful interaction with the audience; and a spine-tingling bluesy-ballad cover of the Beatles' "She Loves You" that snuck up on just about everyone in the audience, including me, and had folks hootin' (including me) with excitement at song's conclusion.

He also performed a charming, rhythmic, bayou-like romp, "Don't Crawfish Me" (a song he said a person he met in a bar offered to him); his ballad  "Sometimes" that a front-row spectator had requested ... and then transmitted live (with Edwards' blessing) via cellphone to the spectator's wife, Marsha, who was not at the show; and that wonderfully uplifting "Sunshine," which he gave an interesting syncopation makeover for the Series crowd in attendance.

After Edwards' final number of the regular set, I witnessed something I'd not seen at a Series show before: an immediate -- and unanimous -- standing ovation with more hoots and hollers. Would he come back to offer a clearly appreciative and satisfied audience an encore, and could it possibly top everything else he'd already done this night? Yes ... and yes. Edwards sung, a cappella, a stirring, spine-tingling (there's that phrase again) environment-awareness song that he dedicated to the recent observance of Earth Week.

Bottom line, the show became my new favorite of the dozen or so performances I've seen now in the series. The next season of the Series will open Oct. 13 and feature a return visit from John Gorka.

And now, here are some pictures from Saturday's Jonathan Edwards show. As always, click on the images to see larger versions. The final three images below are from the compelling a cappella encore.

To see a full gallery of images from the show, visit the Jonathan Edwards gallery in the Indy Acoustic Cafe Series area of my online site.

Craig Fuller, son Patrick visit Indy Acoustic Cafe Series

Anyone who enjoyed and/or remembers pop music in the 1970s and '80s surely was touched at some point by Craig Fuller. He founded the country-rock band Pure Prairie League, which had 1970s hits in "Aime" and "Let Me Love You Tonight." In recent years, Pure Prairie League has reformed with Fuller at the helm again. In the late '80s and early '90s, Fuller fronted the reassembled band Little Feat, which had gone on a lengthy hiatus after the death of the band's co-founder Lowell George in 1979.

Fuller helped restore Little Feat's position among rock's echelon. He was the force behind three attention-grabbing Little Feat albums, "Let It Roll," "Representing the Mambo" and "Shake Me Up."

Fuller went on to other projects through the years, and now is touring as an acoustic act with his son Patrick. The two of them performed Saturday at the Wheeler Arts Community Center in the Fountain Square cultural district of Indianapolis to deliver a delightful show as part of the long-running Indy Acoustic Cafe Series.

Fuller dipped sparingly into his Pure Prairie League and Little Feat repertoire; I was most impressed when he performed a Tom Rush song -- "No Regrets" -- that Fuller said he felt had gone grossly underappreciated over the years, and I agree. Rush released the melancholy "love lost" song "No Regrets" from the early 1970s as the front, lyric portion of a two-part composition. It transitioned into a intriguing acoustic guitar solo romp called "Rockport Sunday." Fuller didn't do the latter, but he took a nice stab at the former.

Patrick Fuller dazzled as an instrumentalist and on several solo tunes during the show. His charm was contagious, delighting the nearly full house in attendance in the intimate theater.

Last up in the spring season of the series, on April 28, is Jonathan Edwards, who dented the Billboard charts with a hit single "Sunshine" in the early 1970s and has been enjoying a life of performing and farming in western Massachusetts ever since. Series manager Mark Butterfield said the fall season would begin Oct. 13 with a return visit by John Gorka. 

These pictures are from the Saturday show; a full gallery of images can be found at my Indy Acoustic Cafe Series folder at my online site.

 

 

Singer-songwriter Ellis Paul revisits the Indy Acoustic Cafe Series

I'm finding myself in "catch-up" mode once again, at least as it pertains to this blog. I'll start with the older shoot here. That was this past Saturday's installment of the long-running Indy Acoustic Cafe Series at the Wheeler Arts Community Center in the Fountain Square neighborhood of Indianapolis.

This night's featured performer was Ellis Paul, a singer-songwriter out of Boston when he first appeared in the series in 1998. Paul now makes his home in Virginia.

He ran late for Saturday's show and jokingly blamed the recent change in time from Standard to Daylight Saving. He made up for it with his music, his passion in the performance and with some pleasant stories between songs, including one that transitioned into a cover of a Roy Orbison classic, for which he borrowed sunglasses from a member of the audience to add a touch of reality to the Orbison "look." It was the Orbison tune he was singing when I took this post's lead photo (above).

He even had a couple of audience participation songs -- one in which choreography was a key component; you'll see a shot below of audience members participating in that. You'll also see, at the very end, a frame from his last song, when he left the stage and filtered out into the audience and performed "Annalee" without the benefit of microphones and stage lights. In fact, lighting right smack dab in the middle of the crowd was almost non-existent, so I did what I'd never done before on my Canon 7D -- I pushed the ISO to its maximum level, 12,800. 

At home afterward, I filtered the image through noise-reduction software in post-processing. The shot of the crowd in the front row participating in the choreography was a challenge as well. I was seated on the floor at stage right, and stage lighting drops off dramatically when it hits the crowd, even in that front row. I used aperture priority at wide open at 1250 ISO and rested the camera on my knee, using the live view function to compose and focus then waited till I saw the crowd movement would hit a freeze point before tripping the shutter. The shutter speed on the shot below was 1/6, not something I could have done ordinarily hand-held, even with my image-stabilized 70-200mm f/2.8L lens.

A full gallery of shots of Ellis Paul's show can be found in my smugmug.com gallery. For those of you who haven't dropped in there recently, I've photographed 11 shows in the Series now, so I've created a separate sub-category for them in the Music folder.
 

Griffin House, Vance Gilbert play the Indy Acoustic Cafe Series

I'm still trying to play catch-up with shoots from the past month or so. Today's post is devoted to the front half of a two-shoot night -- Jan. 14 -- the Griffin House and Vance Gilbert performances (Gilbert pictured above) for the long-running Indy Acoustic Cafe Series.

The performers played at the Wheeler Community Arts Center in the Fountain Square neighborhood of Indianapolis. House, from Ohio, opened; following him to the stage was the more seasoned Gilbert, a Philadelphia native, started out in jazz and gravitated to folk music -- with a healthy portion of comedy as part of his act. It was Gilbert's first return to the Series in 10 years. The full house enjoyed both performers. Next up in the Series is Shawn Mullins, Feb. 24. Mullins is making his second visit in as many years. Last year's Mullins show sold out early, and Series founder and organizer Mark Butterfield is exploring the possibility of holding the Feb. 24 in a larger venue to accommodate the expected interest.

For the Griffin House show, I did a little something different; I shot almost exclusively with a new Sigma 85mm f/1.4 lens, mostly to explore its advantage and/or limitations. I did grab some closeups with a Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L IS lens near the end of his set. For the Vance Gilbert show, I returned to my usual MO: a mid-range lens (Canon 24-70mm f/2.8L, which is new in my camera bag) and the 70-200mm. Also a little different in this post of an Acoustic Cafe Series show are a couple crowd shots. I've grabbed some in the past, but never used any in a blog post. So the inclusion of the two at the bottom are a first here for a Cafe Series show.

After shooting the Series that evening, I drove north to Carmel, an Indianapolis suburb, to shoot some performance shots of the Indy Cover band the Bishops at Mickey's Irish Pub. I'll post shots from that in the days ahead. The following Saturday, I drove south to CG's Sports Cafe in the Johnson County town of Bargersville to grab a few more stills, some formals/portraits and some video of the Bishops. Some shots from that shoot also will be forthcoming. 

These images are from the House and Gilbert shows Jan. 14. To see a full gallery of shots from Griffin House's show, visit this link. For a gallery from Gilbert's performance, visit this link.