Crazy Arms by Damon Smith and band
Melbourne Cabaret Festival Roadshow
The Count’s, Monash University Performing Arts Centres
Wed 2 Oct 2024
I bloody loved watching Damon Smith play tonight.
I’m a devotee of the piano going way back like him, but I did it from a yearning to belong. The better I got at the piano, the more accepted I might be, I hoped.
There’s a sort of club of people who can control the beast with 88 keys that could kill you just by leaning the wrong way, and I wanted in.
Damon Smith can control that thing way better than me, and yet what I found so magnetic about watching him was…I don’t know he wants to be in that club.
It’s like he wants to poke that beast in the eye then hang on for dear life.
Damon and the 88-key beast do not get along, and that makes them amazing together.
I’m not so much talking about his gorgeous and bruising original music like the tunes off 2020’s lockdown masterpiece Golden Dappled Thoughts, Momentarily here.
Like the top-flight modern songwriter performer he is Damon coaxes beauty out of pianos (as he does guitars and his own Joe-Henry-but-more-agile voice box) for poetic effect.
I’m talking about the prequel saga, stories of the beast that go way back.
This was Damon’s piano roots show, so we got a tour de force in mostly Black American piano of the mid 20th century, and it was this music that showed me a side to him I haven’t seen or heard before.
The piano started out the instrument of royal courts, then later of the middle class.
The 88-key club was exclusive.
But in the period Damon spends most time in, 1920-1960, Black pianists in the South stormed the club, and made the beast come alive in new ways.
Damon is a white guy from Perth. It’s 2024. So this show could come across as incongruous, some striving posing anachronism.
In other hands perhaps. It could all sound pretty tame. Clayton, not New Orleans.
To work, this show needed more than just playing, it needed living, and it got it.
Damon didn’t just play Boogie-Woogie, New Orleans, Nashville, he channelled body memories that started life in other bodies and got another shot in his.
Because, I suspect, his body knows.
Memories of suffering, some his and some not his, burst into the room not so much as sadness, but as a kind of restless agitation.
The beast was twitchy.
This was the blues, ragtime, Fats Domino, Nina Simone, Ray Charles, so our ears should know what to expect, right?
Yes and no. Tom Waits once accused the piano of drinking, like an unreliable partner whose best use was to cop the blame for the player’s faults.
I don’t think this piano had been drinking, although it nearly ingested a banana peel at one point.
But it hadn’t been thinking either.
This is not cerebral music, it hits the heart and the gut, not the head.
That Yamaha grand, lid open fully, was not a brain but a beast, and Damon Smith wasn’t here to tame it. He was here to taunt it, to dare it to snap that lid on his fingers.
I don’t know who won in the end, and I don’t care, because the contest was everything. We were kept guessing, on our toes.
We should have been on our feet.
On a hot Saturday night in New Orleans we would have been. But it was a cool Wednesday night in Clayton. We clapped appreciatively. Someone even heckled slightly.
But then we all went home. It’s a school night.
The piano was shut and covered, resting up after its 12 rounds with Damon Smith.
I bet it dreams of a rematch. I’d watch that.
*Yes, that’s a banana on Damon’s piano, it’s a thing, you have to watch his documentary Mental As Everything. He’s full of interesting facts about bananas, and sold me a hat with one on it, so I’ve got something to wear for next time.
The Normal Grown-Up 