Concert Review: Warren Haynes Band with Colorado Symphony

Warren Haynes Band with the Colorado SymphonyDreams and Songs Symphonic Experience
Red Rocks
September 10, 2024

I was skeptical. Pairing a rock band or a jazz band with a symphony, more often than not, just doesn’t work. Adding strings to rock or jazz bands usually seems like pouring a half cup of sugar into your taco or making sprinters in the 100-meter dash carry a half-grown bull-calf during the race, or tossing an anchor overboard from a full-throttle speedboat on glassy water on a summer evening. It just doesn’t help and things are better without the needless addition.

Warren Haynes has spent his career in the blues/rock/roots arena; music known for gritty realism; bad romances, drugs, alcohol, and shady characters, but also joy and good times. Haynes, along with Derek Trucks, was a part of the last incarnation of the Allman Brothers. He filled the lead guitar slot for a while in the Dead after the passing of Uncle Jerry, he’s led his eponymous band, which has a decided funky tilt, off and on for a couple of decades, and, possibly most notably, he’s been the head man of Gov’t Mule for 30 years. Haynes has explained that the reason he started the Mule, while still a member of the Allman Brothers, was to promote and keep alive the heavy rock sound he grew up with, i.e. the blues rock of Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, Cream, Hendrix and others. Tuesday night, he played tunes from all those aspects of his musical life.

So, how would a symphony, with all those strings (and bassoons and oboes for cryin’ out loud) fit into the unrelenting heaviness that is Warren Haynes? I kept thinking of Nelson Riddle wrapping Frank Sinatra’s incomparable voice in saccharine washes leaving Sinatra with a mouthful of cotton candy. Would Haynes subject himself to something like that?

But it worked.

It was all about the orchestral arrangements. Rather than pouring sugar into that taco, the arrangements were all hot sauce and spice. Instead of using the strings and the rest of the orchestra to just pretty up the music, the symphony parts became integral to the songs. The prime example of that was the “Thorazine Shuffle,” a Gov’t Mule tune from the second album Dose (Volcano, 1998). That one is built on an infectious riff primarily carried by the bass. The song itself is about the treatment of psychoses, you know, how to stop going crazy. The key riff, therefore, is crazed, unbalanced, and undeniably catchy. In the symphony arrangement, the entire orchestra took up the riff, sometimes in its complete form, and sometimes broke it down and passed it around. One section of the symphony would start the riff and halfway through, another section would pick it before it was passed off again. The effect intensified an already intense affair and brought vibrant new life to a tune the Mule has been playing for decades. But it got better: the coup de grace was when the violins plucked the riff. “Thorazine Shuffle” pizzicato! That tune was the third number of the second set. I had mostly come around to the Warren Haynes Band with a symphony by that point, but this one sealed the deal.

Another tasty use of the symphony was the Allman Brothers’ classic “Whipping Post” from their first album, also appearing on Live at Fillmore East (Capricorn, 1971) and a Brothers concert staple for that band’s entire existence. That tune is built on a brooding lick that runs for three 3/4 measures followed by a 2/4 measure or maybe two measures in 6/8 and one in 5/8, or potentially counted as 11/8. However you count it, the result is a delicious grooving tension. Again, on Tuesday night, the orchestra took up the key riff and embedded itself into the song rather than playing the part of a cheesy angel chorus hovering over the proceedings. As with “Thorazine Shuffle,” the “Whipping Post” arrangement heightened the tension in an already edgy tune.

The full symphony was tastefully deployed yet again for the Grateful Dead’s “Terrapin Station.” That was one of the Dead’s more ambitious projects with that tune taking up a whole album side of the record of the same name. It was a rather grandiose work in the first place featuring some orchestra and choral parts in the original, so selecting this one as part of a symphony night was a logical move. Haynes had played this with a symphony before when he performed the Jerry Garcia Symphonic Celebration a few years ago.

In an interview before the show, Haynes mentioned that he had a lot of material to choose from for this project and so it was fairly easy to pluck a dozen or so songs that would lend themselves particularly well to orchestration. For instance, “Banks of the Deep End” has been a long-standing staple of Mule shows. The song is about the death of the original Mule bassist Allen Woody and the grieving aftermath and then searching for a replacement. The poignancy of the lyrics and music were enhanced by the symphony. A couple of other early Allman Brothers songs seemed like good candidates and showed up on the setlist. “Dreams,” in its flowing 3/4 time was a good fit with the orchestra helping to set the dreamy mood. Likewise, the symphony helped, rather than hindered “Revival” with its hippiesque insistence that “Love is everywhere.” A latter-day Allman Brothers’ song, “Instrumental Illness,” from that band’s last studio album, Hittin’ The Note (Peach Records, 2003) also made an appearance.

Haynes may or may not be the current hardest-working man in show business, but he’s certainly in the top 10%. Tuesday night, the band played three sets, two with the symphony and one with just the core band for a total of three and a half hours of playing time (this doesn’t include intermissions or the set change). Joining Haynes Tuesday night were Kevin Scott, the new bassist for the Mule, John Medeski of Medeski, Martin, and Wood on keyboards, Terence Higgins (formerly of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band and a prior incarnation of the Warren Haynes Band) on drums and jazz saxophonist Greg Osby, primarily on alto sax. The band also featured two backing vocalists, Saundra Williams and Mayteena Morales.

The songs in the third set were mostly from Haynes’ solo albums with a couple of Mule tunes thrown in. The Warren Haynes Band has a new album coming out before the end of the year, Million Voices Whisper (Fantasy, 2024). The setlist included three songs from that forthcoming release. As with prior iterations of the Warren Haynes Band, the third set had some Mule overtones but was somewhat lighter and funkier.

The Colorado Symphony isn’t touring with the Warren Haynes Band. The band collaborates with local orchestras around the country to stage this production. Conductor Rich Daniels tours with the band to lead each orchestra which is important because Haynes would often cue Daniels who would then cue the orchestra. That’s part of Haynes’ improvisation and it can’t be written into the score.

So, the project is a success. It just goes to show that sometimes even questionable concepts can triumph in the right hands. For his part, Haynes says he enjoys working with symphonies. They provide a unique kind of power. And, as someone constantly on tour and in motion and who is endlessly creative, this concept is yet another outlet for that creativity. And then there is also the possibility that the symphony thing is driven in part by his competitive desire to have a bigger band than his friend and fellow guitarist Derek Trucks and the Tedeschi Trucks Band.

Set List:

First Set
Dreams and Songs
Dreams
Banks of the Deep End
Spots of Time
Revival
Broken Promised Land
Terrapin Station

Second Set
Raven Black Night
Just Another Rider
Thorazine Shuffle
Instrumental Illness
Forevermore
Shakedown Street
Whipping Post
Dreams and Songs (reprise)

Third Set
Tear Me Down
River’s Gonna Rise
Man in Motion
You Ain’t Above Me
Lies, Lies, Lies
Power and the Glory
Invisible

Encore
Life As We Know It
Soulshine