Reviewed on Friday August 28
Last summer I had the singular pleasure of attending the Woodfolk Folk Festival (it was in fact my fifth Woodford, but each time is singularly unique). One of the pleasures of any festival is the discovery of artists who had slipped your radar, and this year it was the phenomenal blues/rock/folk stylings of Jeff Lang. Rarely had I seen a musician bring an instrument to such colourful life, and across electric, acoustic and slide guitars he came very close to transforming the whole festival into the Jeff Lang Showcase.
Lang has been cited as one of the hardest-working performers in Australian music, and it’s no faint praise. From solo shows like that at Camelot Lounge, to the Aus-Indian fusion of Maru Tarang, Lang is one busy bluesman. As such, my one gripe from this performance was an impermanent disconnect with the audience. There were occasions where he seemed to lose any engagement with the crowd, staring out across the room like this was any other gig on any other night – which is also entirely fair. There’s no charter that behoves a musician to also act as showman, and Lang dropped enough off-the-cuff remarks throughout the evening to keep his banter fresh.
More to the point, it allowed his attention to remain fixed to each song. You occasionally hear someone remark how an accomplished musician can make playing an instrument seem so simple, but it was constantly clear just how hard Lang was working up there. His focus was incredible – not because he was at all struggling, but because he crafts each song with such depth and intensity (or as he quipped, “Don’t show any fear, the guitar will know and turn on you.”). We were fortunate to be sitting close to stage, and watching his fingers blur up close was a sight to behold.
The highlights of the night? I went in heart-in-hand to hear ‘Five Letters’, and sure enough it appeared mid-set. Something I enjoyed most of all was hearing the wildly enthusiastic crowd going mad for songs I was completely unfamiliar with – clearly my Lang learnin’ has a ways to go. The encore, ‘Throw It All’, was one such song, but my money sits on ‘Running By The Rock’ as the evening’s pinnacle. That said, with faults few and far between, each song was brought to evocative life, and I cannot wait to catch the man in action again.
