[ Metro | Metroactive Central | Archives ]
Heavenly Harper
By Nicky Baxter
IT MAY BE A CLICHÉ, but life is a regenerative process. Last year, popular music lost one of its most singular voices when the unheralded but protean figure of Ted Hawkins passed away just as he was beginning to receive the recognition he long deserved. Hawkins' storytelling oeuvre was hell for compulsive niche-makers. To say he was a gospel singer, or a classic rhythm & blues shouter, or a bluesman was simply misleading; he was all of those things. The smart guys in suits probably kicked themselves for waiting too long to give Hawkins his due; surely there'd never be another one like the street musician. Then along comes Ben Harper, a much younger man with an equally obsessive need to tell stories radio rarely allows.
Like Hawkins, Harper is an artist whose music blithely skirts easy pigeonholing. A blues-cum-gospel singer? An unplugged funkateer? An acoustic-guitar-playing black rocker? Ben Harper pays homage to those traditions while inventing others we've never heard before. There are differences between the two men. While Hawkins delighted in spinning intensely personal yarns about an aging man's interior world and sketching out wry observations of life in Venice Beach, Harper's artistic (and musical) palette is broad enough to include politically charged numbers that one can easily envisage the late Bob Marley warbling.
Though a deeply spiritual man--like Marvin Gaye, Al Green, Prince and many others--Harper is constantly tested by worldly conundrums. While he is a stellar guitar player and a singer of considerable promise, young Ben Harper has yet to pay the kind of dues required to convey the soul-stirring resonance of a Ted Hawkins. But what pleasure it is charting his all-inexorable progress. Fight For Your Mind (Virgin), his current drop, is essential listening for fans fiending for real alternative music.
Ben Harper plays at 8pm Thursday (Jan. 18) at Kresge Auditorium, Stanford. Tickets are $12. (415/725-ARTS)
This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
Ben Harper's musical palette encompasses the personal, political and spiritual
Prodigious Picker: Ben Harper plays Thursday at Stanford.
From the January 18-24, 1996 issue of Metro.
© 1996 Metro Publishing Inc., San Jose, CA. All rights reserved. Reproduction
or retransmission in any form prohibited without publisher's written permission.
Copyright © 1996 Metro Publishing and Virtual Valley, Inc.