Music Everywhere - Jazzfest and U2 in Detroit

All around Detroit this weekend, there was music. Music everywhere. Swinging and swaying and people playing. As Bono said from the stage at Ford Field last night, "Detroit. City of History. City of the Future." The past few days, the River Walk and Woodward and the eateries have been packed, from mid-afternoon until well after midnight. The mood has been festive. It feels like the City Of Now.

Herbie Hancock. September 1, 2017.

Aaron with John Patitucci, September 2, 2017.

The Detroit Jazz Festival has been running all weekend. Aaron came in from Central Michigan University to see the shows. By Friday evening, we were downtown to catch the headliners: Wayne Shorter, then Miles Mosley, and then Herbie Hancock. The stage setup at Campus Martius made it difficult for me to see anything other than the video monitor until the final few minutes of Hancock's set, but the sound was perfect, the audience was grooving, and the music was, as Hancock said to describe Shorter's set, "insanely great."

Beck. Ford Field, 9/3/17

Aaron is a bass player, and it was a pretty big deal to him to see bass headliners like Mosley and John Patitucci, who played on Saturday. Hancock's band also included James Genus from the "Saturday Night Live" band. I'd never seen Hancock play. It was hard to believe that he's 77. His band included drummer Vinnie Colaiuta and "quadruple threat" Terrace Martin on sax/keyboard/vocoder (Martin also plays drums as well, but as Hancock joked, "but I got a drummer!"). Their joy for the music was infectious, culminating in the Hancock song that every kid is sure to know: Chameleon

After a 2nd day at Jazz Fest on Saturday, last night was the biggest night. While Aaron went down to catch bassist Esperanza Spalding play with Shorter, Lori and I made a last minute decision to see U2's 30th Anniversary "Joshua Tree" tour over at Ford Field. We arrived at the will call window at the same time as Bono entered the stadium just a few feet away; we took that as a good sign.

Beck opened the show. He played a solid set that included a brief tribute to Steely Dan's Walter Becker. There were plenty of fans around us who knew all the words to Beck's songs. But of course we weren't there for Beck, and as the minutes ticked away between the sets -- the down-time ultimately lasted a full hour as Beck's equipment was removed and the stage was set up for U2 -- we got the opportunity to internalize a scroll of poems and writings from Walt Whitman, Pedro Pietri, Sam Shepard and Elizabeth Alexander (among the ones I remember). One theme that ran through the writings was a long tradition of great writing exposing and opposing racism, nativism and sexism. Still, after an hour of nothing-but-the-scroll, a friend on the other side of the stadium texted, "I think Juan and his buddies have died 6 times already."

Finally, U2 came on to the so-called B-stage, which juts out on to the main floor. Larry Mullen Jr. came out first, to announce the opening salvo for Sunday Bloody Sunday. The rest of the band followed, giving a relatively quick run-through of some of their best-known '80's hits. No video screen, which meant those of us in General Admission who had taken up spots near the main stage saw very little of it. For this first stop of the tour's third leg, Bono made sure to announce that he understood that he was in Detroit, "City of history... city of the future." One recurrent theme was that of "looking for America," an old Simon & Garfunkel tune re-purposed now both for automobile commercials and as political commentary.

U2 at Ford Field, September 3, 2017.

Bono at Ford Field, September 3, 2017.

Finally, Pride (In The Name Of Love) brought to the scroll the "I Have a Dream" text, with "dream" and other selected words helping mark the transition to The Joshua Tree. The band hit the main stage, the light show came on, Bono did a twirl around the mic stand, and we were off! I remembered seeing the original Joshua Tree tour with a friend from Barcelona, from high in the upper deck of Oakland's Alameda County Coliseum. Now, Adam Clayton strolled the stage walkway and was standing barely 15 feet in front of me. The sound was perfect, the band sounded great, and Bono's voice sounded better than ever. I didn't pay a huge amount of attention to the video show, as I wanted to focus on the band. But there were some really nice touches in there. I particularly liked the Salvation Army brass band backing for Red Hill Mining Town.
"Some songs change their meaning over time... but this one hasn't," Bono said, introducing In God's Country. "It's a painting of a landscape that can change in a person, in a town, in a country, when you're not looking. Even in a magnificent country like this one. Even in God's country." Then Bono sang it out, standing in the spot where Adam Clayton had been earlier in the set. That was always my favorite song on the album, so this moment was basically perfect.

Patti Smith at Ford Field, September 3, 2017.

The best, though, was saved for the album's final song. Bono had gone to the B-stage to sing "Exit" (after a clip from an old TV western about a conman named Trump), I glanced at the center mic, and... Patti Smith was standing there. She'd previously guested during a Paris show in late July, but I hadn't paid close attention to such details, and Smith's presence for Mothers Of The Disappeared< in her former home base was a total shock to me. "I am a mother, and my children were born in Detroit. All the mothers. Weep for the mothers!"

Smith's presence and performance elevated the song in to an emotional powerhouse. Flipping the lyrics here, adding her own words there, provided dimensions of reality and foreboding that went well beyond anything I could have anticipated. It was, simply, among the greatest concert experiences I've had.
After Smith's exit, anything further was bound to be anti-climactic. Some people in front of us left immediately upon the conclusion of "Mothers of the Disappeared." The remainder of the show was a run-through of some of the band's singles since 1987.

And then it was over. We walked across dowmntown, past overflowing bars and restaurants, and drove down to where Aaron had caught a post-Jazz festival jam session. The city felt alive, felt like now.

pictures and video c) Matthew Orel