Review and Photos by Jeremy Becker.
As a huge fan of folk and folk-pop, I was really excited to see Sarah Jarosz live. In anticipation of the show I listened to a couple of her songs and watched some of her live performances on Youtube. I really enjoyed her studio work but was absolutely blown away by this show. I arrived at The Chapel, one of my favorite venues in San Francisco, at about 8 o’clock, right in time for the opening performance; they were a duo called Ballroom Thieves composed of Martin Earley on guitar and Calin Peters on cello. They intertwined beautiful harmonies to create beautiful almost lullaby-esque folk compositions.
Sarah Jarosz took the stage with her four piece band consisting of a guitarist, bassist, and drummer; she is currently on tour for her new album Polaroid Lovers. She mostly played songs off her newer albums including tracks from her album Blue Heron Suite; she talked about what this album meant to her and how she had written it for her mother who had gone through breast cancer and thankfully recovered. This was a touching moment where she gave the audience a more intimate glimpse into the inspiration behind the record.
She has won four Grammys and her musicality and songwriting chops reflect that well. I was awestruck by her skill on not only the octave mandolin but also the guitar and the banjo. When she brought out the banjo the audience cheered and she jokingly said, “It’s banjo time” and made a reference to a Beyoncé song where banjo was featured. I definitely noticed a lot of bluegrass and even southern rock influence in her music, especially when her whole band was jamming and her guitarist and bassist got into some pretty intricate soloing. I don’t know exactly how I would classify her music because it seemed to alternate between folk, bluegrass, rock, pop and roots but the throughline was Sarah Jarosz’s excellent lyricism and overall songwriting. She is a fantastic songwriter and was able to convey so much emotion and articulate a plethora of different stories over the course of the show. I didn’t expect so many instrumental solos but was really impressed; I heard a little Doc Watson, Dicky Betts, Jerry Garcia and David Grisman in the more jammy parts of her songs.
The entire band was absolutely locked in for the entire show and they didn’t missa beat. They alternated between their heavier rock adjacent songs and their softer folky songs with ease. The guitar tech was definitely working hard! It seemed like every couple of songs the tech was switching out Sarah Jarosz’s octave mandolin for an acoustic guitar or banjo and the lead guitarist’s acoustic for an electric and vice versa. Sarah Jarosz came on for an encore at the end of the show and performed the Bob Dylan song Ring Them Bells. It was a beautiful rendition of the song and a great ending to an absolutely superb performance.
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