Alabamian seven-piece soul band St. Paul and the Broken Bones played for a sold-out crowd at the Jefferson Theater Thursday night. With a crowd amassing early, the energy was palpable in the pit.
Jessica Hernandez and the Deltas, a rock and soul band from Detroit, opened the evening, feeding off the crowd’s energy. Hernandez, whose voice was both playful and forceful, carried far. She was not, however, without her own sizable crowd — a rare thing for an opening act at a mid-size concert venue. The growing audience danced along to her compelling fusion of jazz, rock and soul in anticipation of St. Paul himself.
Before leading St. Paul and the Broken Bones, Paul Janeway had been “normal” in every sense — an Alabamian bank teller born singing in the church, fair skinned with a gut and wide-rimmed glasses. He appears exactly this way on stage, donning a khaki suit with a pastel handkerchief. He is no less ordinary — except instead of loafers, he wears white patent leather box-toed shoes, and instead of working as a bank teller, he is selling out consecutive shows up and down the East Coast.
The set was full of energy from the very beginning. Janeway seemed to be on every inch of the stage at once, a tour de force both in body and voice. The strength of the band came in its remarkable ability to pull the weight of this energy. In “Don’t Mean a Thing,” hornplayers Allen Branstetter and Ben Griner demonstrated this skill, improvising and occasionally embellishing the rest of the instrumentals.
Most exciting was the unforeseen cover of David Bowie’s “Moonage Daydream.” More memorable, however, was “Grass Is Greener” from album “Half the City,” a song which seemed to grow increasingly louder and faster without overwhelming. The pieces also featured the subtle but masterly melody of organist Al Gamble, an esteemed musician and member of the Alabama Music Hall of Fame.
The band was particularly good at unraveling energy contained in slower soul songs, especially in a particularly powerful cover of Otis Redding’s “Try A Little Tenderness.” Janeway repeated the last verse six additional times to tease the audience, even pausing the band to lie prostrate on the floor between repeats.
While nobody will ever truly compare to the original Otis Redding, Janeway comes eerily close. Perhaps it is his history with the gospel tradition or his bank-telling job from a previous life, but Janeway’s talent seems to lie largely in his sensitivity to the happiness of those around him — in his attention to the crowd and the customer.
“We got two more songs, if ya know what I mean,” Janeway said, winking. Two songs later, the audience roared for an encore anyway.
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