Lickin’ it up

Dan Hicks, in his black-and-burgundy-striped op-art shirt, tidy mustache and sandy-blond hair, looks quite a bit like the guy on the cover of 1971’s classic Where’s the Money. The hair’s a bit more neatly trimmed, perhaps, and the waistband a bit larger in circumference, but the guy who invented a self-contained genre by blending old-time hot jazz, Andrews Sisters harmonies and acoustic folk instrumentation sounds as fresh and lively as he did 35 years ago. And his band lives up to its name.

Kicking off with Red Foley’s “Chattanooga Shoeshine Boy,” Hicks set the tone for the evening; a trip down a Memory Lane based more on the collective imagination of the audience than on historical experiences. But the things we imagine we remember are often more powerful than the things that actually happened, so Hicks’ masterful manipulations of nostalgia are more a form of psychedelic art than a simple evocation of a [nonexistent] simpler era.

The Hot Licks’ stage show is simply presented but highly entertaining. The Lickettes, Daria and Roberta Donnay, dressed in almost-matching red satin tops and black miniskirts, provide the perfect harmonic complement to Hicks’ crafty tenor vocals and keep up a constant underpinning of subtle percussion powering the songs along, all the while flirting with the audience, performing synchronized dance steps and generally cutting it up behind Hicks. Their voices and the intricate arrangements Hicks devises for them are the exquisite icing on the Hot Licks’ musical cake.

But the cake is divine. Fiddler Richard Chom, bassist Paul Smith and guitarist Dave Bell are all virtuoso performers, and Hicks gives them all plenty of room to shine. An amazing, elongated version of “I Scare Myself” contained brilliant solos within its eerie groove.

My personal favorite of the evening was “Hell, I’d Go,” the best comedic, narrative vocal jazz song about UFO abduction ever written, especially as enhanced by the Zappa-esque vocal backing of “the Singing Martianettes.” But there were far too many highlights in these two exquisite hours of musical joy to delineate here. Suffice to say that by the time Hicks introduced the final encore of “Milkshake Mama” the small open space in front of the stage had become a lively dance floor, and most of us wished we could just stay in Hicksville forever.