Dec. 17--Divisive since the first bleat of her distinctive duckling-turned-swan of a voice, Joanna Newsom has remained fearlessly idiosyncratic. Whether sticking with the massive, majestic pedal harp as her instrument of choice or writing complex sagas spilling over with words and fanciful imagery, Newsom hasn't made things any easier. If her fourth album "Divers" isn't quite as challenging as past song-suites and sprawling triple LPs, it is every bit as dense with ideas and odd in detours as its predecessors.
Yet as weird and willfully whimsical as she can be, Newsom has a magical way with winding melodies, and if the strangeness of her compositions can be initially tough to fathom, they're ultimately rewarding in their richness and sense of adventure, and few would fault them as anything less than beautiful. At its best (which is much of the time) the singer-songwriter's music pulls you into her world like a will-o'-the-wisp, and the gilded filigrees of the Chicago Theatre proved the perfect setting Wednesday night for her florid fairy tales and poetic parables.
Often anchored center stage to her massive, immobile harp, Newsom surrounded herself with a capable and versatile trio of support players who rotated between instruments -- drums, violin, banjo, guitar, piano as well as other, more esoteric accompaniments -- that helped her flesh out even her most borderline hallucinogenic fever-dream flights. But freed by a wireless microphone, Newsom was always on the move as well, sometimes playing harp, sometimes playing piano, sometimes gliding purposefully between the two.
The music they produced coursed with eccentric folk tropes and avant-garde ambition, recalling timeless chanteys, the Renaissance and nostalgic Disney scores all at once, with a healthy dose of the fantastic as drawn from countless progressive-rock records and album covers alike. It's a thoughtful conflation, not least because its mysteries and intricacies so often set the mind reeling. When Newsom rhymed "Sapokanikan" (the name of a pre-colonial Native American village near lower Manhattan) with "Ozymandian" (a reference to the Pharaoh Ramses II, by way of Shelley) you had to wonder which word of the unexpected couplet came to her first.
You also wonder what kind of a mind even devises tangled epics such as "Monkey Bear" and "Have One On Me," each hovering somewhere around the 10-minute mark and packed with moments of tasteful virtuosity and incredible imagery ("With the courage of a clown / Or a cur / Or a kite / Jerking tight at its tether / In her dun-brown gown of fur / And her jerkin of swansdown and leather") that nonetheless proceeded with a comforting logic. Watching Newsom play was like watching someone solve a maze backward -- she knows where the end is but still needs to find the way there -- and her vocal mannerisms followed suit, sometimes searching, sometimes squeaking, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, sometimes like hearing the same person perform all the voices in a cartoon.
For a space the size of the Chicago Theatre, the packed crowd proved impressively respectful and attentive, hypnotized by Newsom's wild artistic vision as well as the not-so-simple motion of her fingers flying across the strings, plucking and picking as her stage cohorts patiently waited for their cues -- a drum roll here, some kalimba there. An unlikely warm presence, Newsom nonetheless kept the banter to the minimum, focusing on the flurry of notes and river of words required of her.
Not that she seemed to be working hard. In fact, Newsom made it all look easy, and as with many of the best artists, one suspects it would otherwise be near-impossible.
Josh Klein is a freelance critic.
ctc-arts@tribpub.com
