Music Makes the World Go 'Round...

Music DOES make the world go 'round, and anyone who doesn't believe it has never been to a really good live concert. Some people romanticize their jobs or their lives. I like to romanticize about the fact that I'm a little more of a romantic than the next guy. To keep that fantasy going a few months back, I bought tickets to see Michael Buble at the Louisville Palace and had them e-mailed to Carrie, then called and woke her up to tell her to check her e-mail. (Note to future Cassanovas - any brownie points gained by surprising your wife with tickets to a romantic concert will be more than slightly diminished when you call to wake her up earlier than her normal waking hour.) Carrie and I had never heard of Michael Buble a year ago, but we got into trading CDs with a friend she worked with - Nicole also turned me on to Ben Harper with a live CD - and one of the ones she said we HAD to hear was his self-titled CD debut. Now, my musical tastes have always run older than my age - everything from doo-wop and beach music from the 60's, to electric blues, to jazz and show-tunes - so right away I liked this guy's music. But given how young he is, the smooth image he portrays (I read one review which described him as a jazz singer with boy-band looks), and the fact that he doesn't play his own piano, I was prepared for him not to be much more than a singer with a polished but uninspiring act. Sunday night, I was proven so very wrong.

I don't know why it seems like no good acts come to Lexington, and that's a rant for another time, but Carrie and I found the Palace in Louisville when it was the closest place to catch B.B. King a few years ago. We couldn't believe how cool this place looked once we got inside, nor how intimate the setting was for a live concert. It's almost like being in an ampitheater or an Italian piazza the way the ceiling's been painted and the walls have been carved.


Our seats were 12 rows back from the stage in one of the two center sections, so when the curtain came up, we had a great view of the 12-piece band - no, orchestra is almost a better word - backing the man up. An eight-piece brass ensemble on an updated version of a bandstand, plus drums, stand-up bass, guitar and piano launched into Buble's opening song while we took int the lights and the ruffled curtains that transformed the stage into a jazz club I'd have expected to see more in Atlantic City or Vegas in the days of Sinatra and Martin. The lights came up and there was the silhouette of a man behind a larger-than-life picture frame at the back of the stage. From that moment on, it was a rocking, swinging night of jazz standards with a few new songs thrown in. He may not have played his own instruments, but the man's voice and his body were his instrument. Moves that had to be at least part Elvis were guaranteed to make the ladies swoon, but the music had everybody in the house dancing in their seats. From faster numbers like "Come Fly With Me" (the song you probably recognize from the Starbucks commercials) and a jazzy version of Queen's "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" to a sexy version of "Fever" to slower versions of "You Don't Know Me" and "Try A Little Tenderness", and the original song "Home" (that Buble co-wrote with his pianist) the worst thing for me was trying not to sing along with EVERY song. Halfway through the show, he threw up his hands with a grin and announced his retirement from jazz - "Jazz sucks. Jazz is like a good blues band that fell down the stairs," - then made fun of Josh Groban's style as he started an operatic version of "I Will Survive" and entertained us with covers of Maroon 5's "This Love" and Michael Jackson's "Billy Jean" before coming back out of retirement. When he closed the show, the band stopped and Michael stood on the edge of the stage, singing the last verse and chorus a capella and without a microphone, yet he could be heard in the very back of the room.

What amazed me the most, though, was the rapport this guy seemed to have with the audience, thanking them at almost every break. At one point, he paused to thank the guys who'd brought their wives and girlfriends, reminding us all that he and the band were just there to "put a little air in the tires," and that we were the ones who got to "go home and ride the bicycle all night long." Though the theater and the tickets clearly say no flash photography, Buble stopped after one song to make fun of a guy in the front row who seemed to have no problem with snapping pictures, then said to go ahead and snap away all we wanted. And just to make sure we got enough, he hopped down offstage and ran up one aisle and down another, high-fiving and shaking hands with the folks in the aisles, ending with an impromptu dance with one woman in red who thought nothing of grabbing his butt while he spun her around. It was obvious to us at least, that here was a young man and his band - none of whome were probably older than their early thirties - who were doing nothing more than living their dreams, entertaining people and playing some great music, and that really showed in everything they did, even in the little things like the way he thanked each and every member of the band individually before walking offstage.

Carrie and I left the theater that night smiling, singing, dancing and raving about how good the show was. I also left feeling a little jealous that Michael Buble was living out one of my dreams and I was still designing mining equipment. But like he said in one of his segue's, the jazz standards are still around and people still like them because they're good music, and because they give us hope - maybe just hope that you'll fall in love and life will end happily ever after; maybe hope that you can live your dreams; maybe just hope that life could really be as good all the time as it seems to be in our favorite songs. I know I certainly can't complain...