The excellent Jack Savoretti enjoyed a beer in Prague
He already has seven number ones to his credit, but only the last two reached the top of the British album chart. So can we consider it a new discovery? Rather not. Unfortunately, even the recent successes weren’t enough to sell out the Roxy. Still, it was a great evening.
Live: Jack Savoretti
Support, support: Aiko
place: Roxy, Prague
date: September 29, 2022
Photogallery
© Marie Trávníčková / musicserver.cz
The attendance hurt a lot. The balcony remained closed, and although we would like to see the glass as half full, the capacity of the lower floor was about half full. And that’s awfully little for a star of Jack Savoretti’s stature. Perhaps this was due to an insufficient advertising campaign. The fact that our radios ignore him. His relative obscurity in our region – he was playing here for the first time, so the whispers could not work, nor did the returning fans miss him. Or inflation, energy prices and the associated need for people to save on culture and choose more can be responsible for that. And maybe all of this together. But the fact remains that the ambitions were definitely bigger and that this musician deserved not only to be sold out, but also to move calmly to the O2 arena. Without a doubt, he has the voice and the work to do it. You just need to get his name out there, just like Ed Sheeran, George Ezry, Lewis Capaldi and other songwriters who have shot up in recent years.
© Marie Trávníčková / musicserver.cz
And if there is something unique about Savoretti, it is his voice. A very pleasant velvet color transforms in his songs, his vocals are rough and when pressed he sounds a bit like Joe Cocker. In addition, he has his vocal cords under perfect control and it doesn’t seem that it is starting to rub in any way with almost four crosses on his neck. On the contrary – he is the type of singer who, when he comes to a talent competition like Britain’s Got Talent and opens his mouth, the judges’ jaws drop to the floor and their hands start looking for tissues. And after the volley of compliments, they will immediately want to catapult him to the finals. He is so very good. But he doesn’t need anything like that to live, I handle the work myself. Fans of the series “Sons Of Anarchy”, “Grey’s Anatomy”, “The Vampire Diaries”, “Teen Wolf” and also “One Tree Hill” know his work. For the latter, he even provided six of his own compositions as Gavin DeGraw, the author of the series’ theme song and also an amazing singer-songwriter, accompanied him on the entire tour. She is also known to fans of the beloved, unfortunately commercially insufficiently successful video game “Days Gone” for PlayStation 4, where his song “Soldier’s Eyes” accompanied the protagonist Deacon St. John and his partner Boozer on a motorcycle trip. It was also played in Prague.
© Marie Trávníčková / musicserver.cz
But there was a longer way to get there. And at the beginning of it stood frontrunner Aiko. And as much as we like to support young Czech artists, her performance is unfortunately not possible. The playback and affectation overshadowed her relatively good singing skills, and the resulting impression was not helped by the music component, which was completely run from a laptop. Fortunately, she started playing the main star at the age of nine. The singer performed accompanied by his keyboards and a pair of guitars, and right after the first song it was clear that the ice had been broken. If its Czech premiere means anything, it’s the frequency with which its visitors ripped off the concept. Many times he wanted to tell a story or just sing so that it sounded like it was from a record, but the enthusiasm of his Czech premiere in the publication did not know him in the meantime, so someone kept interrupting him with shouts or euphoric applause. But it didn’t matter at all, on the contrary, it made his concert an even more beautiful experience.
© Marie Trávníčková / musicserver.cz
The son of an Italian father and a German-Polish mother was thus reminiscing about his children, who like to sit him back down at unexpected moments, forgetting the beginning of the song “Dr. Frankenstein” or appreciating the Ukrainian flags and peace symbols he saw around the city when he was first in he passed through Charles Bridge and its surroundings throughout his life. But he also asked for beer twice for himself and his companion, and when he drank the pilsner for the first time, he triumphantly announced only: “Damn, that’s a treat! And I swear it’s not an ad!”
Unfortunately, not many songs have been heard (“Who’s Hurting Who”, “Too Much History” or “Secret Life”, to name at least a few of them), but if you are reading this report knowing that you have never heard his work, let it be a ballad ” The Way You Said Goodbye” is one of the first songs you play in your ear canals. It is a great invitation to get to know his discography more closely. And believe me, he has a lot of similar creeps in his repertoire. The biggest complaint remains the fact that it went by so quickly. The allotted hour with a few extra minutes was gone so quickly that they immediately started asking for extras. Even after them, they still didn’t want to let the singer off the stage. For the fact that there were not many of them, they showed admirable stamina. The enthusiasm, clapping and whistling long after the lights went up and background music started, was telling. And also very rarely seen. But Jack Savoretti only moved to the balcony and amusedly filmed the cheering fans on his mobile phone, but unfortunately he did not make it to the second round of encores. Maybe he didn’t play for us last time.