Review - Bob Seeley

The Time: Sunday, June 19, 2011, 2:00 P.M. to 4:30 P.M.
The Place: The Porch Club, 4th and Howard Streets, Riverton, NJ
Bob Seeley, piano

Seeley doesn't so much play a piano as wrestle it – and sometimes caress it – into submission. His left hand operates with the strength and precision of a piston-driven power tool while his right darts and counterpoints about with the slick, effortless grace of a young Muhammad Ali. Which is, of course, another aspect of this extraordinary concert: How does a man born in 1928 out-muscle and out-energize just about everybody else in a packed room combined, including a boy named Dominick who appeared to be about 16 and later pronounced Bob as awesome, man... totally outta sight?

Dominick wasn’t the only customer having a wild old time. Seeley wasn’t four bars into his opening Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie before every foot within this reviewer’s sight was tapping – and none of them more than Bob’s. The artist wore a fine pair of brown and black two-toned shoes suggesting the elegance of a lost age, and first one, and then the other, started banging out the hypnotic beat: sometimes a heel, sometimes a toe, sometimes both feet going at once. By bar 16 a sweat broke out on Seeley’s forehead and he seemed to hunker down into the piano bench, his shoulders and head now rocking along with the high-style feet. There was a moment of stunned silence at the end of this initial salvo, the audience perhaps wondering whether to leap to a standing ovation so early in any performance, the silence followed by several whoops and applause.

Bob turned on his portable electric fan and got back to work.

Switching up tempos, and volume level, he slid his way into a thoroughly down & dirty After Hours (“the national anthem of black people at the time”) followed by a personalized version of Earl Hines’s Saint Louis Blues and Meade Lux Lewis’s Honky Tonk Train. 99% of boogie is based on a simple 12-bar blues. No matter how dynamic a player, a certain amount of repetition is bound to creep in, and Seeley cleverly minimized the repetitive nature of the form by varying his tempos from piece to piece and mixing in popular material with different rhythms and/or harmonic structures such as Juan Tizol’s Caravan and Louie Prima’s Sing, Sing, Sing... the last, by the way, causing the audience to sway dangerously in its chairs and most of our standing-room-only people to dance somewhat feverishly in place. Bob closed the set by shaking things up yet again, this time offering a hoarsely-sung version of Mama Don’t ‘Low containing bits and pieces of Maple Leaf Rag, The Charleston, Honeysuckle Rose, A-Train, I Got Rhythm, and as if that ain’t enough, God Bless America too.

The artist then turned off his electric fan, mopped his face with a handkerchief, and threw himself into chatting most amiably, answering questions, shaking hands, accepting congratulations, and selling CDs. More than one person commented that whoa, not only is the man a genius but he’s a heck of a nice guy besides.

The second set opened with Sandy Catz suggesting that Bob’s fan probably wasn’t as much for cooling him as for cooling the piano, as otherwise it might burst into flames.

Seeley immediately proved this to be a concern with a hand-blurring rendition of Pete Johnson and Albert Ammons’ Boogie Woogie Dream. Then, changing pace yet again, he followed Dream with Jelly Roll Morton’s Dead Man Blues, the Death Ray Boogie, an Amazing Grace that had the audience spontaneously clapping along, and a slow to warp-speed Closer Walk With Thee -- upon which Chic Bach thankfully delivered large quantities of paper towels front and center so the indefatigable performer could clean up both his dripping self and wipe the keyboard down besides.

This wasn’t, the reviewer hastens to add, a sweltering day at The Porch Club: Nine-tenths of the ambient heat was being generated by the hard-working Bob Seeley and was pretty much confined to within a yard or so of Ground Zero.

Seeley varied his second set by telling several “insider” stories as well altering music styles: how Fats Waller wrote I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, and Sunny Side of The Street, and sold both in bars for the price of a drink, plus the tipping habits of Detroit Mafia figures. Musically, he asked for requests and played all except Blueberry Hill – one would assume because the tune normally requires singing and the earlier Mama Don’t ‘Low had all but rubbed Bob’s voice raw. Among the other requests, all fulfilled, were Take The Lobsters off The Ice, Bear Cat Crawl, Viper’s Drag, Chicago Flyer, and an almost supersonic Bumble Boogie -- a variation based on Rimsky Korsokov’s Flight Of The Bumblebee made famous by Jack Fina in 1948. He finished the set, and show, with a blazing arrangement of Taboo that incorporated everything other than the kitchen sink: major, minor, slow, fast, Latin, a straight swing four beats, stride, eight-beat boogie, you name it. And after a long-delayed standing ovation he cranked out a quick chorus of Show Me The Way to Go Home with the audience joining in, took a bow, shut off his electric fan, and went back to shaking hands and selling a few last CDs.

The only complaint this reviewer heard was how with this kind of music, after a while you wanted to get up and dance... you know, get up and DO IT!