The night Jessica Pratt soothed my soul
The stormy summer sky was the colour of a week-old bruise. People scampered rather than strolled around the city as though everyone had somewhere to be. For a few hundred people, that place was a Jessica Pratt concert. Notably, they were the only ones who seemed to be sauntering, as though they had negotiated a pact with the troubled sky that tonight would be perfectly mellow.
Their wishes were granted. For what could have been ten minutes or what could’ve been a thousand, but was most likely about 75, the San Franciscan songwriter brought a hush to the furore of modern life in a way that not only felt soothing and joyous, but necessary and vital, too.
With no screens, gimmicks, or setplays, just light wisps of smoke, burnt orange ambience, and a band so melded and attuned they could whisk oil into water with a scalp massager, Pratt simply offered up crafted musicianship and awe-inspiring artistry without a single fleck of ego or artifice. Witnessing such greatness and humility is a humbling experience that resets the psyche.
Pratt’s art is perfectly positioned to quell the hectic racket of recent times, throwing a blanket over the externalities of existence and summoning you into the present. The paradox of her music is that it is simultaneously minimalist and maximalist. You could drop a pin into it, and it would end up hitting a triangle. Played out live, it becomes all the more clear that there is nothing in it that doesn’t need to be, but everywhere there needs to be something, there is.
Somewhere in amongst this embalming paradox, she seems to capture the sentiment of our lives. It brings to mind perhaps my favourite quote of all time, from the late Steve Tesich: “Life, it seems, is not meaningless but, rather, so full of meaning that its meaning must be constantly murdered for the sake of cohesion and comprehension. For the sake of the storyline.”
Finding meaning has been all the more pertinent of late. My partner, whose father recently passed away, found the gentle meaning that Pratt’s music offered up deeply soul-soothing: you can have a lot going on in the background and keep things simple, it seemed to assert. Complexity and the easy boon of navigable joy coexist supremely in Pratt’s carefully considered but deeply natural anthems.
It was so natural, in fact, so perfectly mixed, that you could easily lose sight of how truly instinctive the whole band were. It is said that Keith Richards and Mick Taylor had something pretty special going on in the 1970s; well, Pratt and Nico Liebman eclipse that with a stirring sense of alchemy, and they come with the added bonus that neither one of them is an arsehole.
That instinctive mix permeates the magic of the whole show. There’s not much more to it than that. Why should there ever need to be? Throughout the performance, Pratt was little more than a faceless cloud of hair, barely uttering a word to the audience, tunnel-visioned into the intricacies of her own art. That was more than enough. It achieved the highest praise that you can sometimes give to live music: I’d go back tomorrow. And probably the next day…
