Pavlo wows Kelowna again
It was an unbelievable week of five concerts in six days with the last — and one of the best — receiving the least amount of audience support.
To recap: Big Wreck on Monday (850), Johnny Reid on Tuesday (2,550), Santana on Thursday (nearly 5,000), Brantley Gilbert on Friday (2,600) and Pavlo (200) at Kelowna Community Theatre on Saturday.
Pavlo (Simtikidis) has appeared in Kelowna numerous times in recent years and always guarantees a high-quality, high-energy guitar performance of his distinctive Mediterranean sound with longtime bandmates Dimitrios Bogris on bouzouki, Curtis Freeman on bass guitar and Gino Mirizio on percussion.
Pavlo, who only uses his first name, wasn’t visibly upset that the downtown theatre was only one-quarter filled. The low turnout was perhaps because of the other events, three of them in four days at Prospera Place after two months with only monster trucks and a spring home show.
Pavlo is a concert showman of the highest order in addition to his skill as a guitar virtuoso. Although his music has been described as “mixing the folkloric styles of Greek, Spanish and Latin music with pop sensibilities,” that doesn’t go even partway to describing his live shows, which are not only musically mature but contain his own brand of spontaneity.
Pavlo never has a set list. Even though he performs 150plus shows a year, the idea of sticking to a setlist is apparently scary for him. He needs to keep things “fresh and live and in the moment,” as he explained Saturday.
With so few in the theatre, Pavlo announced that all four members of the band would “hang out” with the audience in the foyer during the mid-concert break. They autographed CDs and DVDs, but mostly just chatted with fans (and posed with them for innumerable photos).
In fact, after the lights flashed several times, I had to remind band members that they were expected to stop chatting and go back on stage.
Pavlo then decided all four of them (since their instruments had wireless connections to the sound system) would go up the aisle and briefly sit in row Q while continuing to play.
Pavlo also encouraged fans to get out of their seats to bellydance, which several older woman did enthusiastically, along with Pavlo.
When a fan wanted to take a photo, he gave her iPhone a guitar flourish to remember.
He didn’t just stand and play, but pirouetted, and his feet danced back and forth. He placed the guitar body in front of his face and continued to hit every note. Then he held the guitar behind his head while he played. His antics and animated facial expressions went on and on.
It was even more astounding when the audience found out that he had just flown sevenand-a-half hours to get to Kelowna and then had “a double expresso.”
Pavlo: Mediterranean Nights, a PBS special is airing on 100 public television stations across the U.S.
As for his grinning bandmates, everyone in black with shiny mirror black shoes, they not only performed admirably on their assigned instruments but brought out unusual instruments like the miniscule baglama — “the baby sister” to the bouzouki. And the cajon — a white box from the GP Drum Co. that Mirizio beat with his hands on the front, edges and sides, and for a joke tapped on his head during his solo.
He also proved he could play anything with his drumsticks, from a stool (and the water bottle on top of it) to a microphone stand.
With the atmosphere of an intimate family gathering at a Mediterranean cafe, the band not only performed instrumentals from its albums, including the latest Cafe Kastoria (Kastoria, Greece was his family’s homeland and the location for the PBS special), but covers of Gordon Lightfoot’s If You Could Read My Mind, Never on Sunday (from the 1960 Greek black-and-white romantic comedy film of the same name) and of course, Zorba the Greek (from the 1964 British-Greek comedy-drama film of the same name).
Pavlo then headed to the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island but given his history in the Okanagan and creative setlists/performances, a return to a larger audience is guaranteed.