REVIEW: BEARFOOT
By MIKE DUNHAM
Bearfoot: present incarnation, 2009
Cavernous Wendy Williamson Auditorium filled to capacity on Friday night for a band that originally formed in Alaska and has since made a name in the wider musical world.
The handful of youngsters who came together at music camp and formed Bearfoot Bluegrass in 1999, won the national Telluride Band Competition in Colorado in 2001. This year, with their fourth album, they reached No. 1 on Billboard Magazine’s Bluegrass chart.
Now known simply as Bearfoot, the band has played innumerable times in Anchorage. But this show was different. For one thing, it marked the only time this year the band will play here, part of a home-state tour that winds up in Fairbanks today. They’ll have a break until January, when they start a series of concerts that will take them from Missoula, Montana to Glasgow, Scotland. Success is taking them, inevitably, away from Alaska.
It was their first show here since the new CD, “Doors and Windows,” became a hit. It was also our first look at the band’s new lead singer. Odessa Jorgensen, from California, has replaced original member Annalisa Tornfelt from Anchorage. Tornfelt remains a presence, with two of her songs included on “Doors and Windows;” Jorgensen gets credit on four of the 11 cuts.
Perhaps she also should get credit for being what the band needs to push on to its next phase. She has a clear and personable voice — more lounge singer than Grand Ole Opry — that smoothly shifts from chest register to high head tones. The band was hitherto notable for the blend of three good female voices. But Jorgensen, the lead vocal on most songs, supplies a dominance previously missing.
With Bearfoot, however, dominance is a delicate thing. The group’s seductive attraction is its subtle understatement. The mix of Jason Norris on mandolin (mostly), fiddler Angela Oudean, guitarist Mike Mickelson and bass player Kate Hamre provided solid, but basically back-seat, accompaniment. There was little in the instrumental playing that approached the razzle-dazzle of string players we’ve heard here recently.
Curiously, with the couple of fast traditional-style fiddle tunes they did play — including a duet by Norris and Oudean on fiddles — they got some of the best applause of the night.
Jorgensen handled second fiddle responsibilities competently enough. She contrasted with the staid postures of the other members by addressing the instrument rather like Doug Kershaw, including some snakey leg/hip/shoulder action. But she’s not the virtuoso Tornfelt could be.
Bearfoot: In the beginning, circa 2000.
In 10 years, the band has become less old-timey folk and more introspectively pop — “ambiguous,” as Jorgensen said. Some of that is due to the addition of her moody, sometimes cerebral compositions. “Love is the space between time,” go the lyrics to one of them, “Heaven.”
Bearfoot is most satisfying when playing original material. Oudean’s “Time Is No Medicine,” with the words of its chorus placed deliberately off beat, is a good example.
But even when playing a cover — like the Beatles’ “Don’t Let Me Down” — they infuse it with their own sound. While they flirted with styles from Cajun to country waltzes to Spanish ballads, they felt particularly on target when their tunes fell into a western swing groove, a genre agreeable to the band and tailor-made for Jorgensen’s voice.
Sadly, Mickelson was recovering from an indisposition that kept him from singing — and one of Bearfoot’s strengths is that everybody sings. He kicked in manfully for Tornfelt’s randy a cappella vamp, “Good in the Kitchen.”
An ailing bass and the soft sell approach proved no obstacle to rousing the crowd. The full house was fast to give a standing ovation and received two encores. They would probably have stayed for several more.
After all, it may be some time before Bearfoot gets back to Anchorage.
Find Mike Dunham online at adn.com/contact/mdunham or call 257-4332.