Review: Cory Henry, The Lantern

I went to this one with big expectations because, though I don’t really get the enormous buzz about them, I have enjoyed seeing the big band Snarky Puppy live and especially appreciated their ebullient keyboard player Cory Henry. And, as a longtime fan of the Hammond B-3 organ sound, I had been recently impressed by his The Revival album in which Henry explored the styles and sounds of an iconic instrument that drifted from churches to gospel shows and thence into soul and jazz. 

The low-lit Lantern stage was divided into two, with a nest of keyboards on the left and a drum kit on the right and Henry was joined by drummer Taron Lockett in the classic Hammond/drums duo that used to provide live muzak back in the day. It was an interestingly retro set up, especially given a set list that would turn out to mostly feature soul and pop tunes from before Cory Henry was born. He would later comment that he wanted to ‘go back before Wi-fi, before cell phones’ as well as delivering a long sermon on the evils of streaming. The revival in question, it seemed, was about more than the B-3 organ, though that would have been enough.

His opening number was a bewildering showcase of the instrument’s sound range and style repertoire, from the broken gravel of the bottom end to piercing high clear vibrato via the velvet smooth easy listening setting, with an eager audience jumping in unbidden for a call-and-response workout that transposed into Stevie Wonder’s Sir Duke, strangely mixing staccato melody with mass scat singing on the chorus. It was a highly playful thing to do, creating a game that we were all part of – something he would later repeat with Funkadelic’s We Want The Funk and an incongruously modernistic DJ Shadow-style groove that became gospel staple Wade In The Water.

Surprisingly that would be the only actual gospel number of the evening (though the Revival album has many other great examples) and instead we had covers of Smokey Robinson (Cruisin’), Marvin Gaye (Inner City Blues) and The Beatles (Yesterday), all featuring the keyboard player’s vocals. He’s not bad as a singer – his Ray Charles influenced version of Drown In my Own Tears was pretty fine – but he’s so much more impressive an instrumentalist that the vocals grated at times, not least for that Yesterday.

We got an unexpected bonus when Funk Apostle guitarist (and Jerry Garcia lookalike) Andrew Baillie turned up – just passing through Bristol as it happened – to add a Voodoo Chile Hendrix-style guitar line to Inner City Blues and help create one of the more smoking moments of the evening, with Henry hammering the theme in massive chords reminiscent of Billy Preston in full flight and Lockett building up the drumming. It was classic Hammond music, boiling and breaking, played with sincerity and deserving of the audience’s rapturous applause, but taken as a whole the evening had been a bit of a mixed bag, with rambling monologues from Henry breaking the flow and those audience interactions maybe stretched to the limit. As ‘an evening with Cory Henry’ it had been enjoyable enough – he’s an engaging and witty guy – but maybe the two hours could have been condensed into 60 minutes of high octane musicianship that would have built a real energy and lived up more to the considerable promise of that album.