Live at the Hollywood Bowl—With Orchestra is colossal. And if anyone was going to pull off—let alone, attempt—such a herculean undertaking, it would have to be Joe Bonamassa. Leave it to the man who dreams huge when writing and arranging, and then acts upon those plans with blues-rock magnitude, to reimagine his voluminous catalog with a 40-piece orchestra gusting behind him and his guitar. And to do so live, onstage, before a packed audience, at an iconic venue, captaining a small army of musicians, without a safety net or any chance for do-overs, but with all eyes and cameras locked on you.
No problem. These 80 minutes sound like the mighty, flawless spectacle that they truly were on an August evening beneath Los Angeles stars in 2023. The accompanying DVD seconds that, visually, as Bonamassa, his menagerie of gorgeous axes, his regular band plus the orchestra (conducted by David Campbell, who crafted the strings on the Rolling Stone’s new Hackney Diamonds and, nearly 30 years earlier, for Jackon Browne’s The Pretender) consume the amphitheater’s bandstand.
The setlist comes well suited for such sweeping grandeur, easily translated into heightened drama. The trumpeted prelude and great expanses that come with “The Last Matador of Bayonne,” for instance, turn cinematic: a performance, a story, a mood, an atmosphere in need of a widescreen. Who would have guessed that the crawling “Self-Inflicted Wounds” could crush even heavier under the added weight of French horns gallantly screaming right along with an audaciously ferocious Les Paul? Or that “No Good Place For the Lonely” would serve as such a paradise for violins and violas to flutter en masse, given how vicious that guitar’s gritted-teeth, bent-string solo is?
The new, shared orchestral texture ties together disparate songs pulled from across Bonamassa’s career into seemingly one whole, cohesive, artful concept. It’s as if “Curtain Call,” with its sirocco riff coiling around the climactic buildup, and “Prisoner,” wept on a 1964 green-sunburst Stratocaster, fall in place as chapters in a tale of torment.
Despite already having a slew of live albums recorded at the premier spots (Carnegie Hall, Red Rocks, Radio City Music Hall, Vienna Opera House, Ryman Auditorium, etc.), Hollywood Bowl still distinguishes itself by the sheer grandness of it all. So, yes, you can rock to “The Ballad of John Henry” at the Royal Albert Hall or smolder over “If Heartaches Were Nickels” at the Beacon Theatre. But hearing them here, With Orchestra, is even more stunning. When those symphonic thrusters kick on, the mighty heads-down force lifts Bonamassa off his feet, rocketing his guitar’s already escalating moonshots still all the higher.
Just goes to show that regardless of the staggeringly grand scale, the blues remain the blues beneath it all. Because these 10 songs still come down to a dark, hurting inner core. As Robert Johnson put it: The blues is a low-down achin’ heart disease. And that is precisely the diagnosis Bonamassa reaches by the finale when tearing at the edges of “Twenty-Four Hour Blues” and the even bluer “Sloe Gin” with his voice and Gibson in full howl, Josh Smith’s second guitar, Reese Wynans’ keyboards, backup singers, strings, brass and woodwinds, all storming in unison and in excelsis. Live at the Hollywood Bowl—With Orchestra ranks, hands down, as some of the most absolutely majestic misery you’ll ever experience.
Label: J&R Adventures
Release Date: 6/21/24
Artist Website: jbonamassa.com
Reviewed by Dennis Rozanski
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