Let’s start with the fact that it was the coldest night of the year at -20F. This has been among the strangest of warm winters at a ski resort in history, with almost no natural snow, hardly a forgiving week without a stretch of rain to quickly ruin any fantasy of winter, and the related mood to all this can only find one cure- good music. Add to that even a chippy pressure from a beleaguered ski resort audience: the music better be good.
Spiritual Rez delivered the goods. Warm, sweet tunes that seemed to match the 70’s era vinyl spinning on the turntables before they came on stage, Spiritual Rez surprised the audience with song after song ushering the sweet golden era of reggae into the now, when you- the audience member- suddenly found yourself feeling a true sense of joy, and in the crowd dancing to up-tempo ska dipped in the honey of tight horns and good on-stage singing voices.
The musicians are good solid musicians, but more importantly, they enjoy playing music together and that sense of joy exudes and lures the audience into joining the moment.
Spiritual Rez not only exceeded expectations, but lifted them (for future shows). The horns were well done with versatile arrangements, lead singer Toft Willingham kept a kind of steady up-front but low key profile which I like to see in a reggae band, so what shined was not any one person or persona, but the band itself- the whole.