Oak Cliff, 11.11.2023

During the pandemic lockdown, the Austin-based guitarist-singer-songwriter Jackie Venson became a favorite live streamer at mi casa. Her joyful, friendly persona and mad guitar skills brought some light to a troubled time. It was surprising to hear a young (now 34) player bring such strong electric blues feeling to the instrument in the context of modern (think Prince via D'Angelo) R&B songcraft, but Jackie played it like she owned it. We missed seeing her at the Fort Worth African American Roots Music Festival last year over ongoing Covid concerns, but when her name popped up on the calendar of The Kessler, our favorite listening room, we snapped up tickets right away. 

The pandemic meant that Jackie never got to tour her Vintage Machine album (to these ears the most Prince-tastic item in her sizable discography), but as folks will (cf. Taylor Swift), she continued to develop and refine the material over time, and last month, she released Ghost in the Machine, a reimagined version of the tunes, including extended instrumental outros. At the Kessler, she played the new album front-to-back, the band on the record replaced by sequences which she deftly triggered on-the-fly, with the exuberantly energetic drummer Rodney Hyder her only live accompanist

Live, Jackie puts me in mind of grandstanding rock players like Zappa, Santana, and Frampton, but her wildest inventions take place within tightly scripted structures that require her to remain constantly oriented in time. (I was particularly impressed by their coordination when Hyder would start a song before Jackie triggered the sequence and he was always in time -- and I didn't see him wearing an in-ear monitor.) I heard more Black church in her sound live than I'd expected from her records (debut Joy, which she's re-recorded as Evolution of Joy, and Love Transcends are my faves) -- but then, I suppose that's where so much music comes from. When she dug into some of her older "hits" ("from a time when there are no hits," she joked) that allowed her to cut loose with abandon, she created some transcendent moments.

(Fifty years ago, my teenage guitar mentor and I once spent a night driving around our Long Island town with a guitarist-singer named Billy Seibert, a few years older than us, who'd just played a gig in a bar accompanied by pre-recorded second guitar, bass, and drum tracks. The audience of surly barflies had been unimpressed. Billy talked about wanting to perform with holograms of himself as different characters, playing different instruments. We thought he was nuts. Turns out he was just ahead of his time.)

Opening set at the Kessler was by Houston-based activist singer-songwriter Kam Franklin, whose band The Suffers I'd dug when I heard their Shanachie album Everything Here while working in the record store back in 2018. A formidable onstage presence with powerful pipes and a mission -- inspired by Mavis Staples -- to "put the truth in the music," Franklin took up guitar during the pandemic and is touring her new material in a trio with Suffers percussionist Jose "Chapy" Luna and guitarist-singer Sara Van Buskirk (in whose living room your humble chronicler o' events crashed when HIO played the 2010 Houston Fringe Festival). 

Franklin's new single, "Byrd and Shepard," co-written with Van Buskirk, is a heart-rending remembrance of hate crime victims James Byrd, Jr., and Matthew Shepard; all proceeds from downloads go to the two men's respective foundations. Other set highlights included a song about "talking about things" during the early stages of courthship; "A Bitch Didn't Listen," a humorous recounting of a mishap involving a cannabis edible; and "Sunnyside, TX," a tale of hard times in Franklin's Houston neighborhood ("We've got churches galore but no grocery stores"). Looking forward to hearing Franklin's album whenever she gets around to finishing it. 

(NB: No live performance shots this time because the Kessler always posts pro-shot video from their shows, and I wanted to be focused on listening.)