While you can never really go back in time, there are moments when the past flows into you and you relive a time that has long become extinct. One of those moments came to the CoffeeHouse at Grace Church last week, as the vibrant and a moody music of Margo Hennenbach echoed in the high-arched world of Christian artifacts with the lively and playful air of an irreverent angel.
She instantly brought back the days when I thought I was in love with Joni Mitchell. I’ve always been a victim to clever music and deep lyrics over which Mitchell was a master. Over time, her tunes always grew more meaningful, sometimes mellowing into moods I never presumed they could create. But even Mitchell took time to grow on me, her folksy early albums sounding better after her music moved on into a more jazzy vein, when the earlier work seemed more innocent to me.
Margo Hennenbach’s work struck that same profound yet innocent chord the minute she started to play, her first few tunes of the evening dripping with such innocence and simplicity that I thought I had dropped back in time to early Mitchell. Then, magically, Hennenbach’s music grew in complexity and depth, doing in a few moments what Mitchell had taken years to accomplish. No doubt she had taken years to perfect her style, too, and I was simply seeing the latest polished result. Yet it stunned me just the same.
Because unlike Mitchell or any of the 1960s innocents to whom I have become attached, Hennenbach maintained the integrity of those early years <197> the ringing angelic tones of purity and pleasure that marks us all at an early age <197> and combined it with real, solid musical sophistication. Her fingers pranced upon the piano creating textured rhythms that emphasized her rising and falling voice, setting up silences like a poet.
I wanted to leap out of my chair and hug the child she was giving me, the child that was me, crying all the time for more. And better still was the knowledge that here was no mere local phenomenon. Hennenbach’s performance transcended regional popularity, touching the core of something immeasurably fundamental, of time, of youth growing into complexity without losing its virtue. There was no bitter poet behind this music, the way there is behind someone like Joan Baez, nor the overly saccharine visions of someone like Art Garfunkel. Rather, she seems to combine the vision, textures and movement of Paul Simon with the grace and grandeur of Garfunkel, rising above both with a spiritual immensity that should carry her high onto the sales charts, despite her non-commercial format. Yet for one magical night, she brought back a vision of the world I thought long dead and for that I shall be eternally grateful.