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music
Live | Bryan Ferry

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Hard to say what’s cooler -- having British producer Johnson Somerset reach out on my behalf, having manager Millie Thompson so kindly come through or having the man himself okay a pair of tickets a mere hours before showtime. Let’s just say each is/was equally cool. And together they added up to me catching Bryan Ferry at The Greek last night. And oh what a night! Like most great LA nights, it, of course, began with traffic. Lots and lots of traffic. But that’s like saying it began with air. We all need to get from point A to point B. And we all need to breathe. LA provides more than enough time to perfect both. Besides, what’s a little traffic when you’re ascending Olympus to see Zeus? Millions upon millions of Muslims trek to Mecca each year and they don’t catch sight of Mohammad. (Not that I know of anyway.) Ditto the Christians who make their way to Bethlehem and Galilee despite the fact that Jesus hasn’t been around for over two thousand years. (Not in the flesh anyway.) Do you hear them complaining? Me neither. So, yeah. We in LA got it good. Damn good. We don’t _gotta_ sit in traffic. We _get_ to sit in traffic. And at the end we get to go face-to-face with a bona fide deity. Remember that next time you’re beating the shit out of your steering wheel because the car ahead of you hasn’t moved in 10 minutes. Ahem. Anyway, this isn’t about the journey; it’s about the reward. And some great reward it was too. Bright, bold and beautiful. As tangible as it was otherworldly. As sublime as it was spectacular. So rewarding in fact that it made the proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow look like a box of mere trinkets. Bryan Ferry. He of the suave. The class. The elegance. Bryan Ferry. Singer of song. Maker of hits. Member of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame. Bryan Ferry. The immortal. Right there. Beneath a cavalcade of California stars. At the legendary Greek. You know the tunes: “Slave to Love.” “More Than This.” “Avalon.” “Dance Away.” “Love is the Drug.” Each delivered in Ferry’s own inimitable croon. Last night was no different. One blissful rendering after another. Oh, the hits didn’t come fast. They didn’t come furiously either. They came with grace. The kind of grace only gods can muster. And master. It takes a veritable master to so masterfully deliver such masterworks, and Ferry’s just that. Then again, the man’s been in the game since 1971, so it only makes sense that he’d be masterful. Then too, it doesn’t. There are plenty of so-called classic acts who play by the numbers; there are damn few though who transcend Pythagoras. I speak of Bowie. Cohen. Sinatra. All shuffled off to that great music hall in the sky. And I speak of Ferry. Still here now. Showing us how it’s done. And how it’ll forever be done, so long as there are songs to be sung. Ferry and I didn’t get a chance to personally recollide last night (we last met when I interviewed him in Miami some years back), but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t personally moved by last night’s performance. As he told The Guardian, “on one hand, you try to shape the emotion. But you’ve \[also\] got to feel it.” Ferry did both -- shaped my emotion and made sure I felt it, deep in the very marrow of my being. And I’ll be forever grateful for the experience. * * * Photographed by: [Matthew Becker](http://instagram.com/matthew.becker)