Jimmy Rankin came home Friday night, home to the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium in Halifax. The hall remembered him.
Not just the fans, of which there were many, if just a little short of a sellout crowd. Yet there were plenty of throats to roar raw and twice as many hands to clap him a decent welcome.
The hall has always been happy to echo Rankin voices in Jimmy’s case, a sweet, resonant one. And he’s a natural with a microphone in his hand or on the floor in front of him to help him keep the band at bay, with the hall happy to take his voice and put it gently inside our heads as he goes for broke on a song hook again and again.
That is when the sweetness soars. Where run-of-the-mill pop voices yell their way through, Rankin soars out like a lyric tenor.
There may, in the case of this particular show a sing-through of his first Christmas CD, the just-released Tinseltown — have been a touch or two much of sweetness.
Symphony Nova Scotia, like all symphony orchestras, can definitely rough up a tune if they have to. But when it comes to sweetness and light, you can’t beat them. And SNS, like Rankin, are old hands at the game. There can’t be any orchestra that knows better how to back a Caper country rocker like Rankin.
Depending on the arranger, of course. Here, it seems, based on the scores we heard Friday night, that the further you get from Nova Scotia and the closer to Nashville, which is Rankin’s theatre of operations these days, then the further away you get from understanding an orchestra, and a far cry away from the kind of understanding of David Christensen and Chris Palmer and Scott Macmillan and Asilf Ilyas, for example, to name some of our best pops orchestra
arrangers.
In this case, Rebecca Pellett, Peter Coulman and others wrote music that made the orchestra sound like a synthesizer. That’s just lazy musicianship. What a waste of esthetic opportunity.
The same cannot be said of Rankin’s band. Jamie Robinson on guitar, Stephen Muise on keyboard and accordion, Ed Woodsworth on bass and Brian Talbot on drums play like they and Rankin are welded at the hip.
The band is not just tight but settled. This is a show they know by rote and are comfortable enough with to spark their own creativity when they get a cue to go for it.
Unfortunately, only Halifax and Membertou will get the benefit of the band on Rankin’s Tinseltown tour. Robinson alone will accompany him as the show tours through the Maritimes and into Quebec. But, based on his easy, funky fills and solos in the Cohn, he’ll do just fine.
Rankin sang his versions of Winter Wonderland, Jingle Bell Rock, Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree, White Christmas and Silver Bells, giving them an infectious rock treatment paced by Talbot’s inventive drumming patterns within standard rock grooves.
He also sang his Boogie Woogie Christmas with a real Bo Diddley feel, and several collaborative songwriting morsels with Canadian country rock singer Patricia Conroy, his songwriting partner in Nashville.
Apart from everything else, Rankin is a likable, unpretentious, witty entertainer. He ended the show with a yell-along, a blues riff he had only to sing once for the audience before they joined in — tunefully, I might add.
Even the audiences in this province are full of musicians
Original article: http://thechronicleherald.ca/artslife/210521-rankin-concert-writes-the-book-on-sweetness-and-light
