Tough audiences don’t get much tougher than the crowd that poured into the Chicago Theatre on Thursday night to hear two certifiable legends of American music — Ray Charles and Chicagoan Koko Taylor.
Not that the tony, smartly attired listeners intended to give the A-list performers a hard time. But the fact remained that the evening wasn’t so much a concert as it was a benefit for an undeniably worthy cause, The Children’s Brittle Bone Foundation.
As such, the audience approached the evening as a social gathering, often tuning out the proceedings on stage and producing a nearly constant buzz of conversation. And though one hopes that the hard-working organizers of this event raised a fortune for the debilitating disease known as Osteogenesis Imperfecta, the evening’s headliners had scant chance of connecting with the crowd.
For their part, however, the headliners worked strenuously, if in vain, to win over the house, with Charles playing one of the most generous sets he has given Chicago in years and Taylor taking the stage despite recent hospitalizations. So anyone who paid attention saw two venerable artists giving everything they had.
Taylor opened the evening, her voice less formidable but no less alluring than in earlier performances. Without the high-decibels rasps that have become her trademark, Taylor produced a surprisingly sweet, warm-toned alto that served her well in “Blues Hotel” (which she recorded with B.B. King) and in her signature “Wang Dang Doodle.”
Though it’s true that her voice occasionally failed to yield the note she was looking for, the sheer heroism of this performance made up for it. And when she thanked her doctors at Northwestern Memorial Hospital for attending to a variety of ailments, one realized just how much trouble Taylor had endured to get onto this stage and easily forgave the briefness of her set.
Charles, on the other hand, looked and sounded as mighty as ever, his rumbling, craggy voice and fluid, all-over-the-keys pianism reaffirming his position as a bona fide original of American music. At once a jazz improviser, soul balladeer and church-tinged crooner, Charles unfurled more idiosyncratic phrases in a single tune than most of his contemporaries do in an evening-length performance.
Even on well-worn repertoire, such as “Georgia on My Mind” and “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” Charles created unpredictably meandering lines and the unconventional sighs and moans that keep this material fresh. In a jazz-ballad classic such as “Come Rain or Come Shine,” he gave a drenched-in-soul performance that nearly made one forget indelible recordings of the tune by Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland, at least temporarily.
This time Charles was backed by a small army of performers, including a superbly disciplined swing band and a five-voice incarnation of the Raelettes. The quintet’s gospel-style exhortations smartly punctuated Charles’ free-ranging melodies, epitomizing the sacred-meets-the-secular brand of musicmaking that stands as one of Charles’ greatest inventions.
But even when Charles wasn’t singing a note he somehow stole the spotlight, the ingenuity of his pianism answering the honey-toned vocalizing of the Raelettes.
In the end, however, Charles basically was playing for himself and those few listeners who tried to focus on the proceedings.
One hardly can imagine what this evening would have been like if the crowd had responded, en masse, to the glories that were unfolding on stage.
