'12 Gardens' blooms with Billy's best

'12 Gardens' blooms with Billy's best
Fort Worth Star Telegram - Fort Worth,TX,USA
Throughout a mostly up (with the occasional soap-opera down) 30-plus-year career, Billy Joel, classic rock's quintessential piano man, has never issued a career ...

'12 Gardens' blooms with Billy's best

By ANDREW MARTON

Star-Telegram Senior Arts Writer

Throughout a mostly up (with the occasional soap-opera down) 30-plus-year career, Billy Joel, classic rock's quintessential piano man, has never issued a career-encompassing live recording. But after a much-publicized retreat from the pop scene, a brief flirtation with classical music and a string of gossip-worthy get-togethers between Joel's car and the Hamptons' finest sequoias, the melodic bard of Bayside is back -- and firing on all cylinders with 12 Gardens Live.

Culled from a dozen recent concert dates at Joel's home away from home, Noo Yawk's Madison Square Garden, 12 Gardens opens with Angry Young Man's fusillade of staccato notes. An exhilarating mix of Joel's barrelhouse pianistics and jazz-infused vocals follow. Joel is clearly in fine, limber form.

12 Gardens' two disks act as musical biography, delivering Joel hits that span three decades -- including The Ballad of Billy the Kid, Piano Man, The Entertainer, New York State of Mind, Allentown, An Innocent Man, Keeping the Faith and River of Dreams. The wedding standard Just the Way You Are is, thankfully, AWOL.

Backed by a stellar group of musicians, Joel reproduces live the same shimmering sound, gorgeously hand-tooled melodies and taut arrangements from the songs' studio versions.

With one welcome difference: Now in his '50s, Joel has traveled from choir-boy tenor to husky baritone, which lends a resonant maturity and world-weariness to his once-precocious lyrics.

In his wiser, and more mature state, Joel brings added soul to the cheekiness of My Life. And no one can listen to his 1970s description of Manhattan in Miami 2017 -- "I've seen the lights go out on Broadway, I watched the mighty skyline fall" -- and not think how the song foreshadowed the horrors of 9-11. It is both a chilling and exhilarating experience. Billy Joel, the prescient pianist, is back.

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