Advocates of Rockabilly, Motown or Punk may disagree, but Rock’s golden era may well be that period in the late 1960s and early 1970s when artsy, conceptual (and often British) bands influenced by the wondrous, anything-goes experimentalism of The Beatles and the debut of hip FM radio stations set out to make album-long statements filled with original songs, provocative ideas, creative production and inventive choices in instrumentation and arranging. Jethro Tull was certainly one of those bands — it was led by craggy-voiced singer and virtuosic flutist Ian Anderson, and it’s hard to imagine this ambitious Folk- and Jazz-influenced British rock ensemble arising out of any period other than the open-minded, progressive late 1960s.
It’s also hard to imagine Anderson, some 45 years past the band’s commercial peak, going gently into that good night of the oldies circuit, just playing his catalog devoid of any contemporary meaning to audiences there to relive their youth.
So Anderson has come up with a new, potentially clever way to showcase his old material. The show is called Jethro Tull and it celebrates the old band’s namesake — an 18th-century English agriculturalist who invented the horse-drawn seed drill. Quasi-operatic in structure, with a multi-media element, it reimagines Tull’s life as if it’s in the near future and includes new songs along with such Jethro Tull (the band) classics (sometimes slightly rewritten) as “Aqualung,” “Living In The Past,” “A New Day Yesterday,” “Locomotive Breath” and more. For the show, Anderson is accompanied by a band consisting of David Goodier (bass), John O’Hara (keyboards), Florian Opahle (guitar) and Scott Hammond (drums). Plus, we are told by Anderson’s publicist, there will be some “surprise virtual guests.”
Click here for tickets/more info.
This article appears in Apr 6-13, 2016.