I'd like to describe it in ordinary prose.
This is an outdoor arena near Jones Beach. Jones Beach is a HUGE beach on the ocean on the southern side of Long Island near NYC. In my opinion it's one of the world's premier beaches, tho it's often crowded, given its proximity to the city.
To get there, you have to drive on a long parkway through a marshy/estuary area. It feels like the end of the earth driving out, which it sort of is.
Because of the ocean breezes, it's generally cooler there than inland on hot days. In fact, I was surprised that things actually got a bit chilly when the rest of the NYC area was under a heat advisory during the day.
The concert had 3 parts: 1) Eric Hutchinson solo, 2) Sarah Maglachlan solo, 3) Josh Groban with orchestra and Sarah.
I disliked Eric Hutchinson. He was standing playing an electronic keyboard and singing. He was also doing something with his foot to create some kind of beat. I didn't hear him hit any wrong notes, or anything like that, but I found his performance clearly unremarkable -- a nice, but not extraordinary, voice -- not really my type of music. Also, the way the amplification was set the beat that he was creating was over-amplified in the bass register to the extent that it made my entire rib cage vibrate. I found this sensation made me nauseated. It was really torture experiencing this.
Sarah Maglachlan was *much* better. She sat and sang and played an acoustic piano. She has a much prettier voice and more stage presence than Eric. Still, I found that her songs mostly sounded the same. I nodded off, which was certainly preferable to being nauseated. Still I found that she was overamplified and I wore ear plugs at first, while tweeting my displeasure to Josh.
Later I found that I could take the ear plugs out, which might have been because they turned down the volume or maybe I got used to the sound. I know Josh does read his tweets, or maybe his staff does, so they might have reacted to my tweet.
There were intermissions between these acts. The intermission between Sarah and Josh was especially long.
Then Josh came out. His part was a much more immersive experience. He had a full orchestra plus there was a screen behind him with CG images, which were quite fascinating -- plus it was dark, so I wasn't looking at the sky and the birds. I found myself sitting bolt upright from the first note, completely drawn in.
I was struck at how utterly relaxed his face and neck looked, despite the enormous sound he was producing. I feel that he looks much better in this black shirt that he's wearing on this tour than he looked in the white tee shirt before, tho I still think navy would be better.
He was sounding very good, tho still a bit distorted around the bass. I noticed this at Tanglewood also that the bass was overamplified. What gives Josh? Do you have a bass obsession?
There was a peculiar asynchrony between the video and the audio at first.
Josh started by singing the quieter Broadway pieces from his Stages album. The acoustic distortions were most apparent when the orchestra was quiet. It sometimes sounded like Josh's notes were in a different key from the orchestra. I wondered if he was being thrown off by the distortion, but I don't think that can be, because he's got those in the ear things where he hears things directly, without amplification.
Then Josh went into some of the older songs, like February Song, Allejate, Alla Luce. That's when things really got exciting for me. Then the sound settings seemed to work better and I really got drawn in.
Also I was fascinated with the CG animations on the screen, tho occasionally there were glitches where a black rectangle would appear or things would ripple or become distorted -- still the video portion was generally good.
I took a couple of little videos of the animations
The first was right at the end of Vincent. I really loved this animation, which made the painting come alive in a way that I thought was very authentic
Now I can't remember which song this was, but it had a great animation, I guess "Run".
Tariqh had several solos and I thought he did especially well. He's looking thinner than I remembered. There was something about the closeups, shown up on the big screens, of his black fingers on the strings of the guitar that looked particularly mystical, I thought.
I did think sadly about the absence of Lucia. I am grateful that I've gotten to hear her playing with Chris Botti, but I never got to hear her play with Josh. I didn't notice any violin solos. There was a trumpet solo in Old Devil Moon, of course, which was nice. Josh seems to be getting a lot of different trumpeters to do that solo.
On the whole, despite all these details, I thought Josh's part of the concert was amazing. I was really riveted most of the time.
I was really tempted to drive to NJ for the concert the next day, but I decided my body couldn't take any more driving, since I had driven down from NH the day before.
Below is a record of the tweets that I put out during and after the concert. Some of them are embedded, but mostly they're screen grabs. The screen grabs, you have to click on to enlarge.
@DeneeBenton @joshgroban @rachelchavkin she couldn't have come out and sung something at Jones beach?— Skysong263 ♜ (@skysong263) July 24, 2016
@joshgroban I feel the older songs work better with the size of orchestra and the way you've got the sound system set— Skysong263 ♜ (@skysong263) July 24, 2016
@joshgroban I considered driving to see you again in NJ, but didn't have the energy. It was awesome last night. Particularly the older songs— Skysong263 ♜ (@skysong263) July 24, 2016
Addendum 8/6/16
I'm watching a concert video from CMAC in 2014 and seeing a violin soloist on Vincent. Now I'll have to go back and see if I can find a Jones Beach video of that song. I guess I was too distracted by the CG animations to notice the violinist.
This partial doesn't seem to show one from Darien https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6IK7OQYn7c I can't find one from Jones Beach. Maybe I didn't miss it.
