Fugees, Tobe Nwigwe, Talibah Safiya & more: These are our favorite RiverBeat performances
The inaugural RiverBeat Music Festival is officially in the books.
The three-day festival brought more than 50 acts — ranging from legends and veterans to young stars and unheralded locals — to Tom Lee Park in Downtown Memphis.
The music fest delivered no shortage of notable performances. Bob Mehr and John Beifuss offer some of their personal favorites.
Charlie Musselwhite
Sleepy-eyed, immensely talented, effortlessly cool, Charlie Musselwhite is the longtime Robert Mitchum of the blues. “You know if the blues don’t kill me, I wasn’t intended to die,” Musselwhite sang Friday on the Zev Pavilion Stage, with the casual conviction of one of Mitchum’s doomed film noir heroes — maybe the one he played in “Out of the Past,” who mused: “They say the day you die your name is written on a cloud.”
Martin Scorsese called Musselwhite, to take a supporting role in the director’s most recent movie, “Killers of the Flower Moon.” But Musselwhite’s old hometown Memphis doesn’t call, not often. “I just want to tell you how much it meant for him to get to play in Memphis,” Musselwhite’s wife and manager, Henrietta Musselwhite, told a reporter in the crowd Friday, as her husband and his crack band wailed.
She said she and Charlie moved back to her husband’s birth state of Mississippi three years ago (he was born in Kosciusko, now lives in Clarksdale), after some 40 years in California (the frequent fires convinced them to relocate to less flammable terrain). But wherever he has been, Musselwhite, now 80, rarely has been invited to play in Memphis, the so-called Home of the Blues, and the city where he became immersed in music before migrating to another blues city, Chicago, where he established himself as a harmonica master and a white peer to such Black harp virtuosi as Little Walter and Sonny Boy Williamson.
As Musselwhite performed Friday, he pulled one harmonica after another — like a gunslinger choosing weapons from a collection of pistoleros — from the open maw of a bumper sticker-festooned metal briefcase, which rested on top of a tall stool, in parallel to his microphone stand. “If you can get me to Memphis, I’ll get to Clarksdale on my own,” Musselwhite sang. Sounds like a plan.
— John Beifuss
Odesza
Certainly, the most pleasant surprise of the festival was the show from Friday night headliners Odesza. The Grammy-nominated duo of Harrison Mills and Clayton Knight has become one of the biggest contemporary acts in electronic music, with a series of chart-topping dance albums that have crossed over to the pop charts. In the process, they’ve become favorites on the festival circuit — and it was easy to see why.
The combo wasted no time pulling out all the stops to open their Stringbend Stage set, with Mills and Knight moving between their electronic setups and playing percussion, while supported by a horn section and a drumline outfitted in spaceman helmets — all while a barrage of flames, confetti explosions and a high-tech light show wowed the crowd. And that was just the opening number.
They continued on along those lines during a 90-minute performance that was a perfectly calculated mix of sound and spectacle, that provided a strong kickoff to RiverBeat.
— Bob Mehr
Tobe Nwigwe
I've seen many startling sights during my decades of festival-going, from musicians dressed as mummies to "special guest" Steven Seagal contributing "blues licks" to a set of classic New Orleans R&B at Jazz Fest, but never before have I seen a rap artist who is eight months pregnant — her enormous stomach crowning through a strategic aperture in her specially designed gown — stalk a stage while spitting one ferocious sequence of rhymes after another to the cheers of hundreds of fans.
Proud and seemingly indomitable, the woman was Martica "Fat" Nwigwe, wife of Tobe Nwigwe, a Houston rapper of Nigerian descent, who performed Saturday night on the Stringbend Stage, prior to the headlining Fugees.
One benefit of music festivals is that they expose wandering attendees to artists they may not have encountered among the infinity of choices vying for their attention in the online marketplace. Tobe Nwigwe has released music for seven years, was nominated for the Best New Artist Grammy and has a hit song, "Try Jesus," but I admit he was essentially unknown to me.
Saturday night, he looked like a superstar. Or perhaps I should say, Tobe and "Fat" Nwigwe looked like superstars, not to mention a family. ("This is my beautiful wife," Nwigwe told the crowd. "This is her last show performing before we have our baby. She's eight months pregnant.") Backed by his band, the "compliMINTS" — a large ensemble of musicians and singers, all dressed in soft mint green outfits, some of which suggested the robes of a gospel choir — Tobe Nwigwe commanded the stage with the authority and presence one might expect from a man large enough to be a football player (in fact, he was a linebacker at North Texas). The churchified exuberance was appropriate: This was hip-hop that undoubtedly attracted more than a few converts to Nwigwe's musical mission.
— John Beifuss
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The Fugees
It was a long wait, but after 30-plus years the Fugees finally made it to Memphis and delivered one of RiverBeat's most memorable sets.
Led by Lauryn Hill and Wyclef Jean, (but minus third member Pras Michel) the group had the Saturday night crowd at Tom Lee Park jumping, swaying, moving and waving their hands throughout a genuinely electric performance, that was both triumphant and emotional at times, as locals finally got a chance to experience one of hip-hop's iconic outfits.
Primarily drawing on material from the group's two albums, 1994’s “Blunted on Reality” and 1996's “The Score” — with occasionally forays in Jean's and Hill’s solo catalogs — the Fugees showed why they remain a unique force, once famously hailed by U2’s Bono as “hip-hop’s Beatles.”
— Bob Mehr
'Take Me to the River: Memphis'
The use of deejays and samples and pre-recorded music has become commonplace at concerts, and it can be artful and exciting; but as the ensemble that host Boo Mitchell described as the "Take Me to the River All-Stars" demonstrated Friday night at the Zev Pavilion Stage, nothing elevates an audience like the energy and infectious joy of ace musicians creating sounds with their instruments and their voices while collaborating in real time on a groove.
Born of the Memphis-celebrating "Take Me to the River" documentary/education project launched a decade ago by Cody Dickinson of the North Mississippi AllStars and filmmaker Martin Shore, this RiverBeat highlight combined members (old and new) of the legendary Hi Rhythm Section with a roster of singers and guest artists, including guitarist Eric Gales, Jerome "The Bishop of Soul" Chism and Stax legends William Bell and Carla Thomas. The show started a little before 8 p.m.; the stage was near the riverbank, facing east, so the audience saw not just the musicians but the sun setting behind the Mississippi River as Hi Rythm churned away. What could be more Memphis than that?
— John Beifuss
Talibah Safiya and Lawrence Matthews
The weekend at RiverBeat was highlighted by appearances from a crew of up-and-coming locals who fully showcased the depth of Memphis talent. The style of music may have varied but the unifying theme among this year’s local performers was their ability to infuse new and personal elements into classic forms — that was certainly the case with standout sets from soul songstress Talibah Safiya and hip-hop artist Lawrence Matthews, who both wowed during their respective (though unfortunately somewhat overlapping) RiverBeat performances on Saturday.
— Bob Mehr
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Mark Edgar Stuart
A master of wry domestic vignettes, rueful relationship autopsies and self-deprecating self-portraits, Mark Edgar Stuart is the John Prine of Memphis, or as close as we've got: an expert singer-songwriter whose three folk-rock solo albums are rich with sometimes Gothic, occasionally tragic but more often comic real-world detail.
Stuart needed his sense of humor Sunday, when he and his band — including MVP guitarist Will Sexton — took the small Beale Street Landing Stage, as the first act of the final day of the first RiverBeat Music Festival.
The threat of thunderstorms had caused RiverBeat organizers to delay opening Tom Lee Park until 3 p.m. (In fact, ticket-holders would not be allowed into the festival until about 4:15 p.m., after the lightning had passed.) But the show must go on, so Stuart — in a circumstance that might inspire a future song — was told to begin his show at 2 p.m., as scheduled, even without an audience.
As a result, the band members — five — often outnumbered the people watching the show — four, at the start, including a camera operator, a stage manager, a security officer and a reporter. “Thank y’all, RiverBeat staff, and personnel, and press people," Stuart said. "Doors open at 3, show starts at 2. I love it."
The situation had at least one advantage. "I messed up that last chorus," Stuart said at one point, "but there's no witnesses."
What witnesses were there saw an affable and amused band presenting old and new songs — Stuart's fourth album arrives in July — in expert fashion. Both performance and wordplay — "There's a new kind of blue in my baby's eyes," Stuart sang — were cut short after 35 minutes, when lightning streaked the dark sky over the Mississippi and band and audience were "evacuated" to the shelter of nearby Beale Street Landing. Later, when RiverBeat texted out updated schedules, the Mark Edgar Stuart grid — in an erasure the singer might appreciate — was labeled "CANCELLED."
— John Beifuss
This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: Fugees to Odesza: The top performances at RiverBeat Music Fest | List
