The Jacket Are Back At It

Having their Evil Urges tour cut short by Yim Yames’s injury (falling off the stage in Iowa), My Morning Jacket are back on the road for the first time since welcoming 2009 at Madison Square Garden. Always inspired and innovative about what makes a rock show special, the Jacket have brought the Preservation Hall Jazz Band on tour as support.

With a stop at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival behind them, the short spring caravan dances throughout the southeast. Later this summer, the Jacket will hit some festivals and do a few nights opening for Tom Petty. On the second night of this leg, the phenomenal five-piece brought its virtuosity and ferocity to Nashville’s Municipal Auditorium.

For the small crowd in attendance for the opening set, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band created a timeless, romantic, and clubby vibe, complete with clarinet solos and a soaring sousaphone. For two tunes, Yim Yames took the stage and sang lead through a red cheerleader’s megaphone. The collaborative spirit and mutual respect seen then would return for the encore, where the Preservation party would join the Jacket for a full-on, throw-down, soul-town, funkytronic dance party.

Seeing the Jacket’s many gifts, the Nashville faithful bore witness to the sheer ingenuity of a band that can surf seemingly oppositional genres to create a seamlessly unified wave of wondrous get-down. With Yames’s pleasing pipes and gently charismatic muppet magic at the helm, the Jacket’s sizable mojo has always pointed towards a guided tour through the historic kaleidoscope of popular music.

This night hit all the high points of rock and roll diversity and kept getting higher. Now a staple in their always expansive sets, the Jacket jack the unifying rock anthem and execute it at an arena-fit altitude on tracks like “Gideon,” “I’m Amazed,” “Wordless Chorus,” and “Evil Urges.”

Showing Yames as a folk balladeer who could trade wisdom tales with the likes of  John Prine, the obscure “Wonderful (is the way I feel)” offered a quiet, reflective, mid-set moment of profound lyrical insight. Other soft spots like “The Way That He Sings,” “Golden,” and “Thank You Too!” tap a vein to the 1970s where light rock, soul, and alt-country (before it was called alt-country) converge in an exploding cassette deck of American mythology. A new track – called “Friends Again” on the setlist – also channels a lost Bic lighter raised to the spirit in the sky with direct telepathy to a bygone era.

Of the more passionate Jacket fans, many come for the deeper valleys of the show, the gorgeous dark spots on the sun that can be found in face-scarring psychedelic jams, last week seen in the trilogy of “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream, Pt. 2,” “Dondante,” and “Run Thru” that closed the main set. Wiggy epiphanies like this once gave the Jacket certain stoner credentials, a legend along the lines of “they’re hirsute cave dwellers who live like the-Bonnaroo-of-the-mind never ends.” What’s ultimately refreshing, then, about the encore, is that the Jacket didn’t stop with the revelation of that hard-jamming indy-psychedelic crown they wore after Okonokos.

Like any good musicologist, Yim Yames knows that all good American music has African roots, and his recent explorations of the jazz-soul-funk continuum prove that his spiritual inclination best meets a communal extrapolation without limits based on genre or cultural boundary. Now, some more academic folks have been “Highly Suspicious” of blues funky white boys from Clapton to Page or of afrobeat borrowers like Paul Simon, for their alleged stealing of the “black” sound. Not only does Yames seem beyond that debate and to be sincerely working in a spirit of musical and cultural solidarity, the dance party the Jacket threw for all of us with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band pumped pure bumps of joy into the Nashville skyline, superior sounds that will reverberate in our bones until the Jacket’s next visit.

–Andrew William Smith, Editor

Photos by Andrew William Smith

My Morning Jacket are currently on tour. Please visit www.mymorningjacket.com