By BRUCE DENNILL
Tree63 / Barnyard Theatre Emperors Palace, Kempton Park, Johannesburg
A reliable large audience draw and radio staple during the late Nineties and early 2000s, Tree63 also enjoyed considerable success in the US before splitting in 2009, after which singer, guitarist, songwriter and frontman John Ellis began a solo career and a move towards regular gigging as a solo artist and alongside a number of collaborators in and around Cape Town (having left his home town of Durban). Former Tree63 bandmates Darryl Swart and Daniel Ornellas also moved, to Canada and the US respectively, with this trio reuniting briefly for the album Land in 2015. That collection failed to return the band to its previously achieved heights, which was one of the reasons another reunion was long considered unlikely.
Happily, though, for fans of any part of the band’s catalogue, Ellis’ solo work, power trios or faith-informed lyrics, Ellis recently found the idea of being part of a band more attractive than schlepping around the Western Cape on his own, and drafted drummer Angus Warden (Arno Carstens, Loyiso Bala) and bassist Deon Knipe (Majozi) as his new comrades in arms.
Having been very warmly received in Cape Town and Durban, Tree63’s initial Gauteng foray involved a tour of three of the province’s Barnyard Theatres (sit-down dinner theatre-type spaces), with the opening show at the Emperors Palace venue. Initially, and possibly because the sound desk is up in the rafters, not where the bulk of the audience is, the show sounded like a club gig – read: volume without refinement; plenty of energy but not a lot of clarity. That scenario does underline the “power” part in “power trio”, in which Ellis’s guttural Les Paul and trademark strong vocals leap out ahead of what is an excellent new rhythm section, with Knipe’s animated dancing keeping up with his tireless right index finger, with which he plays the bulk of his bass notes.
The Glorious Ones is an ambitious starting point, but it shows that neither Ellis’ vocal intensity nor his and the band’s commitment to the full-ball punk part of Tree63’s rock songs has tapered off with the passing of time. Big hits – Stumbling Stone, A Million Lights, Sunday, Anxious Seat – come up regularly in the setlist, maintaining high interest levels in audience members who don’t know the albums as well as others. There’s also a moment when Ellis steps into the audience with an acoustic guitar to interact directly with fans and sing two songs solo, including a moving version of Alright, which he casually segues into Bob Marley’s Everything’s Gonna Be Alright and then an improvised segment from Love Will Find A Way by The Zap Dragons because Ellis had noticed that the song’s writer, Tim Parr, was sitting in the audience.
The show’s success as a rock show was already secured before the performances of Treasure and King, which initiated responses to the songs’ enduring Christian content from some parts of the audience – an additional kind of joy to that felt by those appreciating the other performance and songwriting excellence. And matters were brought to an intriguing conclusion when, after the encore, Ellis paused with the acoustic guitar and played a brand new, unknown and profoundly beautiful slow song, giving fans hope for new material soon.
