Lavay Smith and Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers
Over a couple of days during which the Kansas City weather turned less sultry than usual, the unusually sultry Lavay Smith handled the two main chores a non-rock musician is assigned these days. Saturday night, she and her band lit up the Grand Emporium, a tight, gritty blues club. Monday night, the crew gave a sunset show just inside an Overland Park Borders bookstore. At the former, the audience was composed of swing-dancing twenty-somethings clad in thrift-store postwar fashion. At Borders, the tailoring was modern and the cash flowed with suburban ease. There’s little doubt that the band sold more of its nifty new CD, Everybody’s Talkin’ ‘Bout Miss Thing, at Borders, but it played a more convincing pair of sets at the Emporium.
What’s surprising is that the Borders audience, though smaller and less vocal, was a more appreciative group, or at least one whose temperament was better suited to the buttoned-down Skillet Lickers. (It was also cool to watch the band members browse the jazz racks after the Borders show.) In front of the Emporium’s stage Saturday, couples unleashed their inner swing-monkeys with varying degrees of physical ignominy. The group seemed gratified by the response, but the audience was divided between those who wanted to be part of the show and those who were disengaged from the spirit of the music — ticketed for the ride but not budging. This combination rendered the Skillet Lickers anonymous, a mere party band. But with authorship of most of its recorded music owned by its members, Smith and company are a beat ahead of practitioners who treat the music as something to be dusted off from the archives. If anything, they’re too serious, like a black-and-white picture dulled against the vivid painted ties of their youthful followers. Even the smiling Smith, all teeth, elegant shoes and gingerly strapped cleavage, seemed stiff at times.
Smith and the Skillet Lickers are an anomaly on the charts, a recently assembled unit that has gained attention in a short time. Although it would be simple to credit Smith’s siren-like looks, the band generates its own heat, and Smith’s voice is more than up to the task of fronting journeymen who have played alongside some jazz giants. Marty Wehner’s fat trombone goosed several songs, hemmed in neatly by Allen Smith’s and Bill Ortiz’s trumpets. Bandleader Chris Siebert’s piano was subtle, sometimes too much so. Mark Lee’s drumming was gentlemanly, but not meek. On guitar, Charlie Siebert’s playing was good enough to show off but even better for resisting the temptation. The players worked carefully from a notebook of arrangements that seemed to contain heady jazz secrets. Its pages were turned, but the book was more for luck or effect than reference; whatever secrets these players are privy to, they have committed them to memory.
