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Jeanna Duerscherl | The Roanoke Times

It was something seeing Old Crow come out for an encore with mostly electric instruments -- save for Gill Landry, who stuck with his dobro.

As I mentioned in the print review, it was rough going sound-wise with all those electric guitars, but after hearing how much better OCMS has gotten as a string band, I figure a rock 'n' roll act will be next for the band. There's no sense bringing Fender and Gibson guitars on the road for just two songs a night!

Overall, a tight show -- which it should be, considering the band plays most of these songs at every gig.

This is really not my thing, but these guys nail what they're doing, and the crowd loved it. Here's the print review.

The surprising thing to me was the guitar skill of singer Adam Levine. He's got a Carlos Santana feel to his leads, and he can pick fast as greased lightning when he wants to. Main guitarist James Valentine gets his throwback on, too -- he quoted Jimi Hendrix's "Third Stone From The Sun," and has a generally hot blues/rock style.

Musically, their impulses run from corporate rock ("I Won't Go Home Without You") to something much cooler, an updated Terrence Trent D'Arby kind of thing ("Harder To Breathe", "Through With You"). I could've stood a lot more of the latter.

Hank Ebert | Special to The Roanoke Times

It's difficult to decide what was more entertaining about the Lyle Lovett show -- the oddball asides or the fantastic music.

Let's start with the music. I had to leave at the end of the set, to make deadline, but apparently there was an encore, which means that the act played nearly 2.5 hours. That's a marathon set, and though players came and went from the stage, Lovett never took a break (though he didn't appear until after the opening instrumental, "The Blues Walk").

Lovett's adaptation of the traditional "I Will Rise Up" was haunting, with its stare into many faces of death "at every turn row." It included amazing harmonies from backing singers Willie Green Jr., Sir Harry Bowens and Sweet Pea Atkinson.

Green stood out with bass lines that sounded like they came from deep down in a cavern. Atkinson and Bowens, formerly of the band Was (Not Was), are church-steeped soul men who can do all kinds of things to a line or two of music.

Other musical highlights: "Farmer Brown/Chicken Reel", with its chorus of "I'm gonna choke my chicken till the sun goes down"; The equally goofy but musically different "Its Rock And Roll," co-written years ago with Robert Earl Keen; and his latest title cut, "Natural Forces."

He was trying to explain the latter's meaning when a couple of people broke in with questions. A man asked something about Lovett's beloved game, football, and a woman asked the whereabouts of longtime Lovett backup singer Francine Reed.

"And I always love these question-and-answer sessions," he said, to audience laughter, before telling the crowd that Reed has a gig in Seattle that will keep her for a while. "I'll tell her you said hi," he said to the woman.

Other musical highlights: Oldie-but-goodie crowd favorites "If I Had A Boat", "L.A. County" and "Nobody Knows Me." But he didn't just stick to the old stuff. Eight songs were from the past two albums, "Natural Forces" and "It's Not Big It's Large."

The only disappointment for me is just a quibble -- I've heard "The Blues Walk" a bunch of times. Too bad the band didn't open with the instrumental "Tickle Toe," from "It's Not Big ...". I've been digging the band's version of that Lester Young song, and would've loved to have heard it live.

Jared Soares | The Roanoke Times

My review of the Grace Potter and the Nocturnals show last night was one of those that left me wishing I had more room to write. So I'll just add a couple of notes here.

I wrote that the recently retooled act was an improvement over the past lineup. New guitarist Benny Yurco is a strong psychedelic foil for lead man Scott Tournet. Those two, also at the heart of opening band Blues & Lasers, play great, extended harmonies together, giving the band more of an edge than it previously had.

And new bassist Catherine Popper added nice high harmonies to complement Potter, while laying down thick, solid bass lines.

Back to Blues & Lasers. I only got to write a short paragraph about this band, which also included Nocturnals drummer Matt Burr. He and drummer Steve Sharon worked really well together, particularly on tom-tom driven numbers. But ultimately, this band was too derivative of Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, Rick Derringer, Sprit, Crazy Horse and other classic acts.

Aside from the good guitar work, Blues & Lasers didn't really advance those old styles. And neither Tournet nor Yurco is a distinctive-enough singer to transcend that mashup of influences. It was a decent opening act, though.

On Sunday night at Jefferson Center, about midway through his set, Robert Cray picked out a familiar country-blues melody -- Robert Johnson's "Come On In My Kitchen." At least, that's what I was hearing, because I'm a big Johnson fan.

Johnson had actually had repurposed the Mississippi Sheiks "Sittin' On Top of the World," and the Sheiks' tune was what Cray actually ended up singing. So many people have done so many different variations on that melody, it's hard to keep track of who did what when. But for the record, the Sheiks cut their song in 1930, six years before Johnson tracked "Come On In My Kitchen."

At any rate, Cray was amazing last night, and as you'll see from the print review, he is definitely not stuck in the 1930s.

Jay Blakesberg/Retna LTD.

Nash's band, The Waybacks, comes to Kirk Avenue Music Hall on Wednesday night to share a bill with formidable roots singer John Cowan and his band. Read story and get details.

Here, Nash talks about the band's MerleFest experiences, including the "Hillside Album Hour," which grows in reputation. And we stream songs from the band's latest CD, "Loaded" (Compass Records).

Photo: Brett Winter Lemon

In my review at roanoke.com, I only hinted at the coolness of one particular song, "Junkyard." There just wasn't any room in 12 column inches to write about what a performance Zac Brown Band gave on that number.

"This next song's going to make you want to eat a whole handful of Prozac," he said, to laughter.

Then he told a story about how he'd spent his youth holed up in his bedroom, holding a knife and thinking about how he'd like to kill his step-father. He said that the well-appointed Georgia house he grew up in was not a home. He didn't find a home until he moved into a rented trailer, after leaving that house.

But ultimately, he told the audience, "Junkyard" was about letting go of hatred.

ZBB kicked into the song, with lyrics showed that the old man was no good, a put-down artist, a violent man. "You are as sick as you are ugly," bassist John Hopkins sang, in the musical role of step-father. The lyrics were evocative, but it was a musical interlude the band took that turned me into a full-on fan of Brown and his group.

The music dropped out, leaving only Brown on his acoustic guitar and Jimmy Di Martini fiddle, playing what I was certain was a Pink Floyd "The Wall"-era instrumental. (After returning to work to write the review, I sang it to my friend and colleague, Neil Harvey, who helped me figure out that it was the prelude to that album's "Is There Anybody Out There?")

From there, the band launched into a repeating four-bar phrase of a jam -- the first four bars were in straight time, the fourth in a prog-ish 7/4.

Where else are you going to hear a country band doing that? Well-played, gentlemen.

Read my thoughts on Skillet's set at roanoke.com.

Now for a few notes on the openers:

The night's first band, The Letter Black, was pretty cliche-ridden. Fortunately, it only played about 15 minutes of nu-metal meets pop-punk.

Decyfer Down, led by singer TJ Harris, laid down a half-hour of ponderous, serious, revelation metal. Harris showed a flashy pop-metal tenor, nailing high notes as he shook his long hair around. The crowd went wild for the hard-hitting addiction lament "Fading" and the acoustic guitar-driven "Best I Can."

Aside from Skillet, Ontario band Hawk Nelson was the best-known band on the bill. To me, the band's pop-punk is dated and annoying, but the kids in the crowd seemed to love it. And it does write some catchy, sing-song hooks. "The Show," "Bring 'Em Out" and the title cut of new CD "Live, Live, Loud!" went over great with the audience. And of course, the Hawksters played their VH1 hit, "The One Thing I Have Left."

But for the life of me, I can't imagine singing along to lyrics like this, from "Letter to the President":

>Same-sex marriage in a state where they don't care
>Murder is wrong but the jail time's not fair
>Not to mention date rape, felony, and car theft
>Break it down and tell me what we've got left

Christian McBride

Jefferson Center, with its capacity recently reconfigured to 924, was mostly empty on Sunday night for Christian McBride & Inside Straight. The show drew 385, and the rest of you missed what was one of the best displays of jazz mastery you're likely to hear in Roanoke.

McBride, though, appreciated what he had, particularly in light of the band's long journey to get here from French Guiana. Read details of that jazz odyssey and more in the print review. He also was impressed that the valley has hosted him three times -- twice as a bandleader (he played Roanoke College a decade ago), and once with Pat Metheny.

There are plenty of big cities in the United States that haven't booked him this many times.

"Roanoke, you deserve your due," he said, to audience applause. "This is a hip, swinging town, baby. Give me Roanoke and Vegas any day, baby."

The McBride show climaxed a great weekend of music in Roanoke. On Friday, Chris Hillman and Herb Pedersen played Kirk Avenue Music Hall. On Saturday, Delbert McClinton headlined the Big Lick Blues Festival, sounding his roadhouse hot best with his rock-solid band, Dick 50 -- more on that show in an upcoming column.

McBride and his band, though, might have been the best band playing *anywhere* this weekend. Amazing.

Read print review.

Now for a couple of things I didn't have room for in the review:

> Ysaye Barnwell held down the bottom end for this act. It would be tough going for Sweet Honey without a solid bass presence, or at least the lower end of baritone. Barnwell made that happen, and in combination with the other vocalists' chord singing on beats two and four, provided a deep groove for whoever was singing lead at the time. It was like drums and keyboard at once.

> Sweet Honey in the Rock has long worked with an interpreter for the deaf. Its interpreter, Shirley Childress Saxton, apparently gets quite a workout, too.

> I am pathetically ignorant about sign language, but I learned two things tonight. First, the sign for the word "heaven" is flat palms to the heart. For "devotion," the hands are clasped in from of the chest.

> During a percussion-only section of the Malian prayer song "Denko," Saxton worked out a hip polyrhythm with her hands. It doesn't take fluency to get that, and you don't need to hear it to realize something cool is going on.

Now for a quick note on Jefferson Center's latest version of its Star City Performance Series. Announcer Cyrus Pace, filling in for the Jeff's artistic director, Dylan Locke, told the crowd that the 2009-2010 series has recorded its best-ever season ticket sales.

Afterward, box office and guest services manager Sarah Webber said it has sold 397 season tickets this time out. Last year, it sold 289.

Next up in the Star City series: The Robert Cray Band, on Oct. 18. That show has already sold out, and judging from a couple of listens to Cray's latest disc, "This Time," the audience is in for a series blues/rock/soul treat.