Jimmy Webb
London Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club
25th September, 2007

View: seated

Jimmy Webb was barely out of college when Frank Sinatra, Richard Harris and Glen Campbell got their hands on him. Some 300 songs later, and his soundbites of past times sit comfortably in the red cabaret-velvet of Ronnie Scott’s. But this is no simple retrospective. Webb is promoting Live & Large In The UK, a title that undercuts the criticism snapping at the heels of his otherwise phenomenal career: that he can’t perform his own stuff as well as others do it. Webb may once have been an edgy and tremulous young man, silently screaming on the studio sidelines, but tonight he underpins confident vocals with complex and unsettling chord structures – everything from Debussy to Jarrett. And he claims the music back for himself. Webb’s interpretation of his own material is so different from that which is familiar, it’s like hearing the classic songs – such as Wichita Lineman and MacArthur Park - in a bold, alternate reality.

Reviewed by Kate Mossman
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