Julian Sas – Blues with a Feeling

Julian Sas was booked for next year before he even played a note on Saturday. The same went for last year and probably the previous year too. What makes hordes of Dutchmen (and no few Germans) head up the Autobahn to Bonn every year ? It’s not as if he has any hit singles to play or a glorious laser light show to wow the audience. Julian Sas just saunters onstage, plugs in his Gibson, and mesmerises.

“Playing live is the real deal. Living with the moment”. That’s how the gentle giant of a Dutchman describes that moment to an interviewer. “We’re a hard working band, trying to improve every night. That’s what people like about us”.

Sas’ words are something of an understatement. Calls of ‘Julian!’ and shouted requests for various favourites break out between practically every number. He could play until midnight and still not please everybody.

Julian does his best though. With a watershed time of 10.30pm he kicks off with no support at 8pm on the dot. This will be the bands last show this year he tells us, so they want to party. Last show in mid November? A lot of musicians would be envious of the time off, but Julian still has a day job. He wants it that way. Bass man Tenny Tahamata reckons they have done around fifty to sixty shows this year in variously sized venues – a highlight being a Blues evening with Snowy White amongst other top players. It could well be that the managable number of shows is a reason for the quality of each show – no-one gets jaded playing night after night. Whatever the reason, this band clearly enjoy playing. The smiles on their faces suggest that it’s great that we’ve come along to watch them but heck, they would have had a great time even without an audience. But, since we are here, as the man said – lets party!

Sas and drummer Rob Heijne seem to change expression with every note and every beat respectively. Just turn off the sound and watch those guys and you could ‘feel’ the music in their faces. Tenny Tahamata on bass is the opposite. When the groove really hits him he raises a straight leg onto the drum stand, smiles ever so slightly, then the leg comes down and the smile blinks off until the next emotional highpoint. ‘Mr Cool’ might be his name. Don’t be fooled though, just as Heijne could often be seen moving his various drum stands a millimetre to left or right, so Tahamata was prodigiously tweaking guitar and amp knobs. Sas himself, like a certain Mr Bonamassa, tended to change guitar every song. Like the aforementioned JB, it was always worth the wait too, especially for the down and dirty bottlekneck slide on his Gibson Firebird.

An excited, slightly inebriated, Dutchman next to me is shouting in my ear ‘Almost as good as Rory’ after Sas has played his traditional homage to Mr Gallagher by way of a blistering ”Take What I Want’. I nod in agreement, but think – “Rory is Rory, Jimi is Jimi and Julian is Julian. Scientists will hopefully never clone musicians”. At the same time though I can’t help wondering if Julian Sas stood on a stage somewhere the day after Rory’s passing and felt a little different when he played. Maybe the G man found a way to carry on doing what he loved after all.

We were promised some new songs during the evening but how can you play all the old favourites from ten CD’s and find space? A 12pm cut-off time would have helped just a little. Last week saw Anne Haigis play a blistering show that did more than squeeze the pips out of the curfew time.

Julian Sas had another, rather ingenious, game plan. Play something so special that you couldn’t follow it – so amazing that people would be walking around with open mouths for an hour afterwards. What do guitarists play when they want to impress? You guessed it – Hendrix.
So Julian Sas played ‘Hey Joe’ and we all went home happy. Okay, it actually wasn’t that simple. Julian conjured up the sort of moods and sounds that a certain Jimi H dug from the bottom of his own soul so long ago now. He took the song up, brought it down, and took it back up to the moon again. Jimi would have been satisfied to have played like that this evening. The lights went out, the applause eventually (several minutes later) died down, and along with everyone else present I headed home to the amusement of fellow bus passengers who wondered at the tongue hanging out of my wide open mouth. Next time I’ll wear a badge saying ‘I’ve just seen Julian Sas live onstage’.

N.B. Special thanks to Bernie Gelhausen and the ‘Mr Music’ Team for organizing Julian’s concerts each year. I’m sure the posters will be up in his City Centre Shop next week for Julian Sas 2010. Don’t miss it!

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