Photo: Gardner/Getty
“You don’t mind if I play a little music?” Lenny Kravitz asked as he closed the Voodoo Music Experience Sunday night in New Orleans. After a weekend of costume and spectacle, his two-hour set was almost old school in its focus on songs and musicianship.
Voodoo ‘09 in photos: Eminem, Kiss and more.
The show was a homecoming for Kravitz, who bought a house in New Orleans in 1991 after visiting to see Aretha Franklin play Jazz Fest. (He performed alongside the Queen of Soul Friday night at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 25th anniversary concert in New York.) Little in his two-hour show seemed specifically geared for a New Orleans audience until the encore, when he called local musician Trombone Shorty to the stage to rave up the extended encore of “Let Love Rule.”
Read about Eminem’s return to the stage at Voodoo fest.
The set was part of Kravitz’s 20th anniversary tour for Let Love Rule — an album he recently reexamined for Rolling Stone — but he didn’t make it halfway through the album. Instead, he sprinkled songs from his debut through a hits-oriented show that periodically stretched songs including “Believe” and “Blues for Sister Someone” into lengthy, funky jams that walked the fine line between exploratory and meandering. His only concession to showmanship as a bank of neon tubes on the back wall that evoked an American flag during “American Woman,” which marked him as a yang to the Flaming Lips’ yin.
The Flaming Lips preceded Kravitz with their full arsenal of confetti, streamers, costumed dancers and toys, and while Kravitz played a self-contained celebration of rock’s eternal verities, Wayne Coyne was a trickster, wrapping up the festival by telling tall tales from the stage. He quoted ...
Article Source: Rolling Stone : Rock and Roll Daily