Jethro Tull: The Rock Opera

Ian Anderson, In Concert, November 5, 2015

     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyWbLyMwo8Q

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JETHRO TULL:  THE ROCK OPERA

REVIEW BY JOE VIGLIONE

      In the theater where we Bostonians caught many a film, “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” in 1969, “Diamonds Are Forever” after that,  how appropriate that the seminal seventies group, Jethro Tull, morphs into a three-pronged multi-media event here at what is now the Wang Center.  The Rock Opera, is, of course, also a ock Concert and an onscreen film with an added fourth dimension, the original lead singer narrating and performing alongside, inside and throughout the presentation.   Always ahead of the curve Ian Anderson isn’t content for a band to play with the holograms of Frank Sinatra, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin …with an idea that the Beatles will go from Cirque de Soleil to the hologram circuit as well – Anderson presents a living, breathing human being turning the tables on the hollow digital heading towards us like the big old train on the screen in “Locomotive Breath.”

    With Jethro Tull’s publicist on the phone before the show I noted “all these gray-haired people with Tull shirts on were probably at the half dozen or so Jethro Tull concerts I attended in the 1970s – Thick as a Brick, Passion Play, Bungle in the Jungle from War Child. Let’s call it a class reunion, of sorts, with the eloquent personality and his flute that we have followed for the better part of five decades.

    My old pal Buddy Guy was playing next door at the Wilbur Theater, Steve Miller Band performed in Lynn, Massachusetts, a rather big night for classic rock in Massachusetts, in Boston proper. And let’s be honest here, all three artists have their material and their performance skills down pat, this is the fine wine presenting a new episode of their artistry in the middle of the second decade of the new millennium.