Edmonton Journal from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada • 18

smsnt Jm EDITOR: CATHERINE CARSON Saturday. April 14, 1979 B6 Takes quiet stand No tinsel-town trip liijii Stewart born to rock 4 By GRAHAM HJCKS Keeping up with Rod Stewart hasn't been easy. Stewart does not like ihe printed word to the extent no press interviews with the singer will be given during his North America tour. "He's been misquoted too many times." is the normal response of the public relations types. Your correspondent tried.

Phone calls to record companies, promoters, England. No. interviews. Not even with the band. Stewart arrived quietly in the city Wednesday with his 32-man entou- Four semis piled equipment had ar- rage, with rived tn Alberta Wednes By GRAHAM HICKS There is cause for rejoicing, cheers and beers.

Rod Stewart made it loud and clear Thursday night rock is his life, his blood, and his cause celebre. A little nod to disco-funk was made with Do Ya Think I'm Sexy. But, by and large, the opening show of Rod Stewart's summer-long North American tour was an unpretentious rock-and-roller, a show lapped up by 14.500 folks who shelled out $1 1 each to see the hottest man in rock and roll (14,500 times $11 $159,500 for two hours work .) Rod the Mod's glitter life in Los Angeles, a hit record that's breaking sales records around the world, previous splashy tours appeared a Super-Star, I-am-God trip was in the making. It wasn't. Not in the least From the outset, when the 'R S' emblazoned red curtains parted to reveal Rod Stewart dramatically posed in a single spotlight, Stewart made it clear he and his band of two years standing were out to have a good time.

No dancers, no razzle-dazzle lighting, no. pre-set choreography. A minimum of makeup. Stewart wanted to let the world know he rode on his musical laurels, not his glamor. Stewart literally ignored the new album, Blondes Have More Fun, playing only three of its songs.

A good half of the two-hour set consisted of Stewart interpretations of classic songs old blues numbers, rhythm and blues, a medley from the golden era of the mid-'60s British rock scene. Plus his own goldies-but-oldies. When the rather vacuous rockers of Blondes have More Fun were sung, they at least had some some guts. Much better than the sassy, shallow record versions. There were faults with the show.

With three guitarists, one would have expected far better guitar breaks. The sound system was inferior not nearly up to par with the Supertramp system, or even that used by Boz Scaggs last year. Stewart never put his voice on full throttle. (No doubt thinking about the dozens of shows to follow.) But over-all, it was so much better than a tinsel-town travesty. It was an honest show.

The two-hour set took a few songs to settle in. Rod, dressed in a pink satin track-suit with black strips down the sides, seemed to be feeling out the crowd and the band during Hot Legs, and Foot Loose. The man had definitely toned down the act He's developed a graceful, flowing stage presence. Still sexy, turning around and shaking his rear at the crowd. But it appears, married man that he now finally is, (like my mother would say, "after all, he IS his flirtation with androgeny is over.

A great smile crossed his face when the crowd roared to the opening bars of Tonight's The Night. The band fell into place with a polished raunchy guitar ending by the three guitars, Billy Peck, Gary Grainger, and Jim Cregan. With Get Back, the spontaneity and down-to-earthness began to show. Here was Stewart, the man reputed to have an ego the size of the Loch Ness Monster, playing a Beatles' song. day morning, after driving night and day from Los Angeles.

The band rehearsed Wednesday afternoon at the Coliseum, before retiring back to the Edmonton, Plaza. According to WEA records promotion man Mike Pleau, Stewart didn't bring his wife, Alana Hamilton. They were married last week in Los With the three guitars pumping out the rhythm, and pianist John Jarvis pounding in the background, Stewart took some chances with the song, playing around with the arrangement, echoing the refrain back and forth with his fans. A couple of the romantic ballads followed, You're In My Heart, and The First Cut Is The Deepest. Stewart wasn't afraid to experiment, singing quite differently from the recorded cuts.

Roddie went back to his roots, and cut up the show with an excellent version of I Just Want to Make Love To You, an old Muddy Waters number popularized by the early Rolling Stones. He whipped out his harmonica, playing along with Gregan in a song that he might just as well have been playing in Twickenham station back in 1965. The band hadn't played the song live before. "How's that?" asked an obviously delighted Stewart after the song. Blondes Have More Fun came off as a rhythm and blues number, proving production to be the chief culprit in the bland recorded version.

Do Ya Think I'm Sexy, first time round, was simply thrown in as a little surprise, and the song was shortened to merely one minute. The guitarists looked bored, while bassist Phil Chen had his moments of glory. That sugar-sticky song was palatable live with the single of new band member Phil Kenzie, rather than 500 overdubs. Stewart never pushed his voice to full kilowatt capacity, except during Layla, the old Derek and The Dominos song. It was vintage Stewart taking a great song, shaping it to his own liking.

Cregan was wise enough not to challenge the original guitar work. Layla came on the tail end of a medley hich included I Don't Want to Love You (an old Temptations song), All Over Now (Rolling Stones), and Stewart's own Standin' In The Shadows of Love. Stewart was unabashedly proclaiming his roots, telling the doubters he was still a rocker. Carmine Appice's short drum solo was a delight. Fluid, interesting, crisp fast bass pedal work, and tasty use of synthesizer drums.

Rod came waltzing back in a leopard top and leotard bottoms, finished off Shadows of Love, then, with "here's a good old number," sw-ung into Maggie May. Chen and Cregar sat on the risers, playing as if the band were wood-shedding on a Sunday afternoon on an old verandah. Not your super-star image at all. Stewart left the spotlight for Sweet Little Rock and Roller, leaving Peek to duck-walking across the platform at the back of the stage, chasing an imaginary Chuck Berry on his guitar. For the encore, what else but Do Ya Think I'm Sexy, hotter and heavier this time around.

Rod even acknowledged a wee bit of his recent past, picking up tartan scarfs hurled on the stage, and juggling a beach ball tossed up from the crowd. No soccer balls on stage, though. No props at all. Just Rod, the band, and back-to-basics, tried and true, rock and roll. PHOTO BY JIM COCHR.ASE Rod Stewart at the Coliseum We were crying the blues over you, Rod Stewart The tour began in Edmonton.

Mr. Pleau says, because it's away from the United States a milder situation. Stewart, like many other top-draw acts, has found W'estern Canada a good place to gear up for larger American and Canadian cities. At the same time, a star like Stewart doesn't scoff at the area, Pleau says. "The first thing he asked when he arrived was how the record was doing." In Alberta alone, Blon des Have More Fun has had 100.000 albums sold since it was released in December.

In Canada, it's up to a half-million (Journal rock critic Graham Hicks' impressions of the Rod Stewart concert at the Coliseum came from a vantage point about 15 metres from the stage. Dana Rudko, music contributer to the Journal's Teen Page, watched the show from up in the blues. Here is his report.) By DANA RUDKO I'm singing the blues hello down there! Rod Stewart, I was there. But where were you? Row 36, Section 2. The blues.

Them big bad blues. At the same price as those fancy viewpoints on the floor. From up here ere, near the roof of the Coliseum, Rod Stewart's show was sterile. Up in the blues, we felt left out. We had to resort to illegal drugs and binoculars in a vain attempt to get into the spirit of the show.

Too much of the lyrics and Rod's between-song banter was lost to us. Projection from the too-few speakers was absymal. Up in the blues, the sound left much to be desired. For Sll a seat, the show should be designed to be as accessible as possible to everybody. As usual, the blues were left out.

When guitarist Billy Peek did a guitar solo on risers behind the stage, the blues couldn't see a thing. To see is to believe. When you can't see hat's happening, you get the blues. The band sang the blues. It felt, the blues.

But we had to sit in them. Metis leader preaches revolution again via tube By JAMES ADAMS Before his neck snapped on Nov. 16. 1885. Louis Riel felt he had a good chance of returning to life on the third day, just as Christ had done 1,900 years earlier.

Well, the Metis leader didn't make it. But this Easter Sunday at 8:30 p.m. Canada's most famous revolutionary will experience a belated resurrection before millions of Canadians, thanks to the miracle of electronics. After two years of production and weeks of intense publicity, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Green River Pictures Inc. are finally unveiling their three-hour, two-part epic.

Indeed, the hysteria surrounding the project has been such that it's virtually a patriotic obligation to watch this recreation of a man hung for treason a century ago. Well, you're wondering, should I turn on the tube Sunday and Tuesday evenings? Definitely. Riel is a gripping drama, well-acted, superbly photographed, with a decided epic sweep. In the first hour writer Roy Moore and director George Bloomfield present Riel (Raymond Goutier) as a kind of Martin Luther King figure articulate, rational, intensely devoted to his people's cause during the 1869-1 said he found the production "fine. But the struggle and the fight hasn't changed too much." University of Alberta history professor Lewis Thomas was "a bit disappointed." The battles looked authentic but "I think they missed some opportunities that would have helped the general case they were trying to make." "They took quite a few liberties with the facts." he said, especially in combining Archbishops Antonin Tache and Ignace Bourget into one character and a similar amalgamation of Dumont with Riel's Manitoba lieutenant Ambrose Lepine.

Lake, Fish Creek and Batoche. As for the cast, Raymond Cloutier may look more Jean Paul Belmondo 'than Metis but he acquits himself well. Riel's real titan, however, is Christopher Plummer as Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald. Certainly, there are times when screenwriter Moore turns Sir John into The Mouthpiece of History every issue, large or small, provincial or federal, become a test of the very identity of this country?" he moans in the second instalment.) but Plummer demonstrates great energy and At a recent preview of Riel.

Metis association president Stanley Daniels little or no explanation rather like the Joseph Wiseman character in Viva Zapata. Cloutier seems to come out of now here to wrap up the Metis leadership in the first 20 minutes. And when he suddenly visualizes the Northwest Territories as a New Jerusalem for the world's oppressed, the viewer gets a couple of nice suggestive images but little else. In fact, up until the final 10 minutes of the second instalment (when Cloutier delivers his valedictory to the Regina courtroom), director Bloomfield pulls away from explaining Riel and the Metis cause in favor of the blood and guts at Duck 70 insurrection at Fort Garry. "You fight fire with fire, paper with paper," he tells his lieutenants.

"Right now the Canadians fight with paper." Then, with his back against the wall, Riel snaps and becomes a kind of metaphysician-numerologist heavenbent on martyrdom. Says he to Gabriel Dumont (Roger Blay) at one point: "I know that if I run it will deprive this of all meaning." If there is one major flaw to Riel, it is its lack of context, of explanatory detail. Viewers, for instance, will no doubt ask ho is that masked man?" at the repeated appearance of a rather dour Orangeman. He pops up in Fort Garry. Regina, Batoche, Ottawa with Shades of Mutiny on the Bounty Da Camera Singers shine in Easter salute to Bach from' America to her father, the governor of the island, and falls in love with the only person brave enough to stand up to the old man.

Ka'Ne gives the most realistic portrayal among the multi-million-dollar cast. Ka'Ne was a 23-year-old Hawaiin surfer with no previous acting experience when De Laurentiis found him for the role as the new-chieftain Matangi. one of the islands' first leaders to talk tough with the American navy. He has the affrontery to fall in love with Mia Farrow and begs for marriage, incurring the wrath of father, the who has the chieftain arrested on a trumped-up charge, stripped of his title and sentenced to four years in prison. Well, Farrow isn't going to stand for that and becomes an outlaw, like her lover.

and. of course, the climactic storm. The hurricane iself is impressively done, thanks to 25 wind machines, 50 rain machines and competent camerawork by Sven Nykvist. Mia Farrow has seldom looked better. Her romantic role is a startling change from the drippy characters she usually plays.

She's still childlike and skinny but manages a warm sensuality as the art teacher who arrives Ka'Ne, the young and rebel-lous Samoan chieftain, builds slowly. swelling amidst celestial music, with a Samoan beat, and the waving palms, the crashing' surf and the tropical sunsets. Director Jan Troell, who did a far better job on The Emigrants in 1971, seems to lack a firm hand and the picture wanders and becomes implausible, trying to encompass everything: the romance, the conflict with authority, the exotic setting Jazz trio transcends bizarre setting HLRRICASE Capitol Square By JOHN DODD Hollywood doesn't make many like Hurricane anymore. This Dino De Laurentis production, made for a reported $22 million, is a throwback, at k-ast to the 1950s an old-fashioned, slow-paced. Technicolor movie that isn't really very good, yet leaves you feeling almost satisfied.

The film is based, unfaithfully, on the 1935 book by Charles Nordoff and James Norman Hall who wrote Mutiny on the Bounty. Hurricane is certainly not in the same class, as a film, although there are resemblances. Trevor Howard, an excellent Captain Bligh in the 1962 production of Bounty, this time plays a grizzled Irish priest, red-faced and crusty, a role the veteran actor knows to perfection. Jason Robards. cast as Captain Charles Bruckner, governor of Eastern Samoa in the 1920s, even starts to sound like Captain Bligh as Hurricane wears on.

He has a calculating, sardonic air and thinks of the Samoans as The fabled romance bet-weeen Mia Farrow, who plays Robards's daughter, and the charming Dayton By CLAYTON LEE It was all-Bach in Music for the Easter Season by Edmonton's fine Da Camera Singers in All Saints' Cathedral Friday night. Performing before a large turnout they were assisted by organist Gerhard Krapf, and members of the Edmonton Sy mphony Orchestra. Larry Cook as the conductor. About 1620, a cantata referred to a sung piece opposed to an instrumental sonata. Later it assumed its form of two or more pairs of recitatives and arias on dramatic texts.

In that non-choral form the cantata was written for an ensemble of two or more soloists and eventually the chorale cantata was set for soloists, choir and orchestra. Bach, the greatest composer of chorale cantatas, composed more than 300 of them. They were a natural choice, therefore, the Da Cameras for their Easter concert. They chose to sing No. 23, Du wahrer Gott und David's Sohn, for Passiontide.

and No. 4. Christ lag in Todesbanden for Easter. Both were sung in German. There was a good balance to the opening duet in No.

23 between Ruth New and Ann Castle. New has a voice of nice quality but it has a decided shake which needs sandpapering, and she didn't articulate too well those pesky 32nd notes. Castle's voice, though small, is quite pleasant. Arthur Querengesser has a good resonant tenor which he uses with extreme 'care. His singing of the recitative Ah! go Thou not far from me was secure and cleanly sung, but I found the strings here much too loud.

In the chorus All men's eyes do wait, Lord, the ensemble sound was fully round, balanced and on-going but it was too much at the same level all through. It may have been done purposely but there was- hardly any dynamic change whatsoever, the crescendos not rising nearly enough. In the final Chorale, sentences were nicely joined and there was again a fine blending. They were far more successful in Cantata No. 4.

There was a good rhy thmic pulse in closely-knit singing to the rapid-moving opening chorus but the chorale (cantus firmus) needs to sound out more to be completely effective. And the quick 'Hallelujahs needed a breaihier 'H to make them more dynamic sounding. In their duet, Elsie Achuff displayed a nicely produced soprano, pure in sound, and Eleanor Wrigley has an absolutley magnificent contralto voice, beautifully round and full. The closing chorale was excellent Gerhard Krapf gave two really fine performances of the Preludes and Fugues in minor and major. They were played with bright registrations and contrasting colors, the tempos steady.

There was full value to every note and he maintained an effective phrasing pattern throughout each work. The concert is repeated Easter Sunday at 3 p.m. more than 20 albums, several Grammies, and a style that Keith Jarrett, Herbie Hancock, Gary Burton and numerous others owe a great deal to. The fact he is only 49 and if anything, playing better than ever, is great news for the listening public. Breezing through two sets of standards and material from his own body of work, he not only maintained his reputation as a lucid and technically flawless instrumentalist, but showed a depth and passion rarely achiev ed in jazz.

The trio setting has always been Evans's favorite vehicle, and through his work with greats like Shelly Manne, Paul Motian, Eddie Gomez and the late, lamented bassist Scott LeFaro, he has been a sympathetic and democratic leader. Woody Herman, Chuck Mangione alumni drummer Joe Le Barbara with warmth and panache throughout and bassist Marc Johnson (also formally with Herman) is without question the finest young soloist on his instrument that I have heard in years. Bill Evans Trio appears tonight at the Mayflower, 96th Street and 106th Avenue, show time 9 p.m. By ALAN KELLOGG Any personal superstitions regarding Friday the t3th were dispelled last night at the Mayflower, as the Bill Evans Trio underlined what superb, sensitive music can be, even in a rather bizarre setting. It's not that I disagree with the Railtowit Jazz Societies' latest choice of venue.

But I must admit I had some esthetic reservations upon entering a room that has obviously run through the gamut of night club interior design over the years. It's certainly not a bad place to listen to music. Nonetheless, it stands as a true provincial museum of kitsch, employing a lighted disco dance floor, pseudo-California Tiffany lamps and Manitoba gothic furniture with a full-sized vintage RCAF fighter tastefully stuck in the middle, and stage lighting out of a Chuck Barris TV game show. One wondered how any group of musicians could possibly get through a serious piece of music without breaking up. I was left with the impression these three artists could have perform in the centre of a carnival midway and command complete attention.

Pianist Evans is certainly a major figure in jazz, with.