Review: Joe Bonamassa ‘Live at the Hollywood Bowl’

Review: Joe Bonamassa ‘Live at the Hollywood Bowl’

By Hal Horowitz

It isn’t often that you push play on a blues-rock album and hear a full ensemble with strings, brass, and woodwinds swelling to a subtle climax. It only lasts two minutes until Joe Bonamassa’s guitar roars to life, his band joins and off we go into a nine minute version of the throbbing prog-blues “Curtain Call,” a highlight from 2021s Time Clocks.

That mesmerizing opening to Bonamassa’s newest live album, recorded at the titular venue, creates the blueprint for the following hour and ten minutes. Joe and band, with two potent female backing singers, roll through nine more highlights of his extensive catalog. The addition of a 40 member orchestra brings heft and plenty of aural drama to songs that already were loaded with those attributes.

Sound like a gimmick? It’s not.

Bonamassa is way too commercially successful to skimp on this combination of classical instrumentation with his patented bluesy rocking and gutsy singing. He hires Hollywood pros David Campbell, Trevor Rabin and Jeff Bova to write and arrange the orchestrations for his debut performance at this iconic stage. Their charts highlight the songs’ inherent power, punctuated by enough hot-wired, extended guitar pyrotechnics to keep any Bonamassa fan satiated. When the union clicks, as it does early with the raging “No Good Place for the Lonely” where the strings enhance one of the guitarist/singer/songwriter’s finest, most heartfelt compositions, the results are goose-bump raising.

Those familiar with Paul Buckmaster’s work with Elton John will notice a connection to that lauded approach. The orchestra never overwhelms the songs, piercing the tunes with just the right amount of firepower, then laying low as Bonamassa’s group takes the wheel.

The tracks on Live at the Hollywood Bowl are long. Eight of the ten (not including the opening instrumental) are over seven minutes and three push past nine. But the energy and tension remain robust and nothing feels overwrought.

Bonamassa uses this unique collaboration to reach back and rescue items hidden deep in his oeuvre. He revives Warren Haynes’ “If Heartaches Were Nickels,” from 2000s debut. The performance, this album’s longest, allows him to let loose on vocals, which sound eerily similar to those of Haynes. The track builds slowly, gradually increasing to a crescendo as the orchestra gently, then more flamboyantly, joins. The backing female vocals enter delicately until they too detonate as one of the singer’s solos, at the seven minute mark, exploding in a shower of soulful wailing sparks that earns her a well-deserved mid-song ovation.

He pays tribute to Chris Whitley, an early influence, by covering the late bluesman’s “Ball Peen Hammer” (from 2007s Sloe Gin), bringing acoustic guitar from guest Josh Smith into the mix. The album’s most direct take on blues is a terrific, emotional version of Bobby “Blue” Bland’s “Twenty-Four Hour Blues” which makes brilliant use of the strings leading into one of Bonamassa’s most scorching solos.

On the moving “The Last Matador of Bayonne” (initially on 2011s Dust Bowl), trumpeter Rashawn Ross (from Dave Matthews’ band) plays the opening unaccompanied Spanish notes which set the tone for the story of matadors who face death daily. That notches another memorable moment in an album overflowing with them.

It’s easy to take Joe Bonamassa for granted. He’s constantly touring, releasing live and studio sets either under his own name or in a variety of extra-curricular side projects, hosting cruises and producing/playing on others recordings, many for his own record label.

But nothing in his resume matches the majestic, often cinematic clout of the music on Live at the Hollywood Bowl on CD/DVD. It expands his blues rock boundaries, creating intensity and integrity that reinvigorates and reinvents his material in timeless, even definitive arrangements that are demonstrative and spectacular.

Watch “Twenty-Four Hour Blues”