“The George Baker band has arrived!” DJ Dooley‑O said from the front of the room. The packed house at Cafe Nine cheered as Baker walked in, cane in hand, flanked by his band. Their instruments were already set up.
Baker took the stage slowly and a little stiffly, and settled into his chair. As soon as his guitar was in his hands, though, he flew.
With his backup band, the George Baker Experience — Willie Moore on bass, Derrick Tappan on drums, Tony Dioguardi on guitar, Lou Ianello on saxophone, and Nick Lloyd on keyboards — Baker was there to lay down the tracks for a live album, titled “A Night To Remember.” If the sound in the room on Saturday night was any indication, Baker has a hit on his hands.
Baker plays and sings with the ease and ferocity that come with a musical life spanning five decades. Baker was born in Louisiana. His early musical career included stints backing up the Drifters, playing in the Apollo Theater’s house band in the late 1960s, and touring with Marvin Gaye. He’s been working and playing steadily ever since, equally adept at jazz, funk, and R&B and soul. But sometime in the 1980s, Baker started to dig deep into the blues. And Saturday night, blues is what the full house at Cafe Nine got.
While Baker’s 2006 release Mojo Lady had the smoother sound of a veteran musician working his craft, Baker’s sets at Cafe Nine jumped and grooved hard. On the raunchy blues standard “I’m a Man” (above) — a song that is notoriously difficult to play well because it’s so simple — Baker was in full command, building the energy with every pass until the crowd had to respond, cheering him on.
Baker’s solos on guitar, meanwhile, dug deep for musical phrases that showed just how expressive the blues can be when the player really knows what he’s doing, and really means it.
Even if it was his show, Baker didn’t hog the spotlight. With a band as good as the Experience is, there was no reason to. With Moore and Tappan never missing a beat or a swing, Dioguardi and Ianello stood out on every solo they had, and Lloyd got the biggest smile from Baker of the night with a solo that included a long meditation on a single note.
The band raged particularly hard on a driving take on “St. James Infirmary,” turning what is traditionally a dirge into a kicker that lost none of the desperation of the song by putting it into high gear.
Like the best live recordings of bands killing it, the crowd itself was part of the music that night, whether shouting back during the song, exploding in applause afterward (“Wow,” a man sitting next to this reporter kept saying; “wow, wow, wow, wow, wow”), or dancing in the seats.
Lloyd, who is also the owner of and chief engineer at Firehouse 12, said that he had set up 23 microphones to capture the sound of the show. If the album sounds anything like the band did onstage on Saturday, “A Night To Remember” will be true to its name.
