JON HISEMAN TRIBUTE CONCERT
VENUE SHEPHERD’S BUSH EMPIRE, LONDON
DATE 02/02/2019
With a star-studded line-up of friends and past collaborators tonight, Jon Hiseman’s family have taken on the nigh-on Herculean task of celebrating the wideranging, influential and prolific life and career of the gifted drummer, songwriter and producer.
Hiseman’s son Marcus opens the show to a pin-drop silent audience, and helps his mother to the microphone. Barbara Thompson lives with Parkinson’s Disease, and it’s clearly quite an effort as she reflects on life with Jon and invites their daughter, Ana Gracey, onstage with her band. In an evening that promises to deliver many musical highlights, Gracey eases the audience in with some beautifully crafted jazz vibes and unexpected covers such as Prince’s Cream.
There are sets from Hiseman’s final project, JCM, featuring guitar legend Clem Clempson and the redoubtable Mark Clarke on bass and vocals, joined by Don Airey for a couple of Colosseum II numbers, including the “complete piece of lunacy” The Inquisition.
Barbara Thompson’s Paraphernalia alumni perform with the National Youth Jazz
Orchestra, covering some extraordinarily lovely and often terrifically exciting tunes, reminding us what a very accomplished composer Thompson is in her own right.
The final hour of the show is spent rebuilding Colosseum, with ex-Gentle Giant drummer Malcolm Mortimore behind the kit; they run through numbers from Jack
Bruce and John Mayall, before delving into the Colosseum back catalogue proper with the likes of Elegy, Walking In The Park and a rousing Lost Angeles.
In an evening of memorable and thoughtprovoking moments, there are a few standouts, including a heartfelt video message from Andrew Lloyd Webber extolling Hiseman’s astounding musical ability, as he then introduces probably the most famous slice of the Variations album (or “Theme tune to
The Southbank Show”, as Webber helpfully adds), with Rachel Lander on cello. There’s also a video of Hiseman’s epic 12-minute drum solo, Solo Colonia, from 1994, and the microphone distortion when the sound engineer clearly doesn’t expect the 78-year- old Chris Farlowe to belt out vocals at quite the volume he does. And the violin magic created by Billy Thompson pretty much every time he appears.
Watching from the balcony, Barbara Thompson clasps her daughter’s hand, as the massed Paraphernalia band perform Little Annie-Ooh, a song Thompson wrote for Ana many years ago.
Hiseman himself is never far away, appearing in a rolling montage of photos spanning his whole life throughout the show. And as the evening closes, with a suitably raucous Stormy Monday Blues, alongside the impression that Hiseman’s 2016 Prog Visionary Award was more than well-deserved, there’s an abiding sense that we should make the most of our time with friends, loved ones and our favourite artists. RIP the remarkable Jon Hiseman.