Show review | A Miracle Named Steve Hill

At Club Soda, Thursday evening, Steve Hill celebrated 30 years of career, the opportunity to measure the extent of a work that is too often reduced to the virtuosity of its creator. The opportunity also to thank Jimi Hendrix for having diverted the Quebec guitarist from the much less rock’n’roll path in which he wanted to embark.

Before falling on a guitar magazine devoted to Jimi Hendrix as a teenager, Steve Hill dreamed of another life: that of a comic book artist. He had only two scenarios in mind: to be hired by Marvel or by DC Comics. But, he would soon find out: “Playing the guitar is the most trippy business there is,” the six-string master told those who came to celebrate Thursday evening. with him at Club Soda 30 years of career.

“We have a lot of music for you tonight,” immediately warned the birthday boy, who kept his promise. His show not only broke the three-hour mark (!), it included tracks from each of his twelve albums, from his Homeric re-reading of I’m a King Bee (recorded in 1997 on this homonymous disc whose cover shows a baby-faced Steve) to the very Pete Townshend riff of Don’t Let The Truth Get In The Way (Of A Good Story) (ironic hymn to alternative facts, taken from the excellent Dear Illusionpublished last November).

After having done a lot of man-orchestra, alone, since 2012, the owner of the largest collection of denim jackets in Quebec reconnected Thursday with his musicians, including his faithful drummer Sam Harrisson (with a game capable of evoking the both the anvil and the butterfly), bassist Alec McElcheran and a brass trio consisting of Jacques Kuba Séguin (trumpet), Édouard Touchette (trombone) and Mario Allard (baritone saxophone).

Thus all aligned, the songs of the 49-year-old veteran highlighted one of the least celebrated aspects of his work: the flexibility of his prolific work as a songwriter, which puts his encyclopedic knowledge of blues, rock and country in the service of a music enriched by this cavernous voice, sculpted by whiskey and adversity. Adversity remains one of his main subjects, the fault of a career where there were many obstacles.

Some beautiful moments of this evening? His funky version ofEmilyusually a blue flower ballad, and, Out of Phaseone of the most melancholic songs in her repertoire, which ended up emerging on Thursday itself from the torpor that its lyrics describe thanks to a shimmering coda imagined on the slide.

windows of vulnerability

At the risk of pushing an open door, let’s nevertheless write for the umpteenth time to what extent Steve Hill is an exceptional guitarist, whose solos are breathtaking, certainly, but without ever lapsing into vain bluster.

Behind his instrument, Steve Hill is a sort of miracle, proof that grace exists in this world. The guitarist is indeed a superhero, in the sense that, like Superman, he shows with each of his solos that even mortals can accomplish superhuman things.

And if a good guitar solo is a way of telling a story, Steve Hill has nothing to envy of the best storytellers, he whose improvisations know how to oscillate between ecstasy and tragedy. On the strict plane of the text, Never Is Such A Long Time is a chest-pumping song in which her fingers carve windows of vulnerability, a tension typical of so many great blues standards. Even in its darkest passages, its work remains on the side of the light, thanks to this play of an insane richness of expressiveness.

“I still love playing the guitar”, confided Steve at the end of a first part of two hours, which he concluded by drawing on Devil At My Heels (his 2007 hard rock masterpiece). Back on stage, beer in hand, the little guy from Trois-Rivières interpreted a dozen Hendrix classics, a generous tip of the hat to the one without whom he might earn his living by drawing.

“Give me something real, give me the truth, give me something I can feel”, repeats Steve Hill at the end of The Collectora few sentences which could also be used to sum up a career during which he never had any other objective than to remain true and to provide his fans, for the moment of a show or a solo, with the feeling of live intensely.