A sparkling Paul Simon ‘Quiet Celebration’ in the first of three nights at the Academy of Music
The unretired songwriter is playing Philadelphia for the first time in seven years. "It's a joy to be back," he said.
Paul Simon wasn’t supposed to be coming back.
In 2018, the New York songwriter — actually born in Newark, N.J. — went on what he called “Homeward Bound: The Farewell Tour,” which played the Wells Fargo Center in what — along with a 2016 show at the Mann Center and an appearance at the 2016 Democratic National Convention — were meant to be his final Philly dates.
But giving up on a lifetime of music making isn’t such an easy thing for a baby boomer icon to do, particularly for an artist with as persistent of a creative drive as Simon’s. His 60-plus year career is remarkable in that it grew ever more adventurous in the decades after his enormous early commercial success.
So — despite suffering severe hearing loss that makes it difficult to hear himself play — the 83 year old singer-guitarist is back in action on his “A Quiet Celebration” tour which began a sold-out three night run at the Academy of Music on Thursday.
Simon and his stellar nine-piece band — plus his wife Edie Brickell, who joined him on “Under African Skies,” and showed off her whistling skills on “Me And Julio Down By the School Yard” — will take Friday off and be back on Broad Street on Saturday and Sunday.
“A Quiet Celebration” is smartly structured. Simon came on stage at 8:18 p.m., and began with brief introductory remarks.
“I’ve played this beautiful hall before and it’s a joy to be back,” he said, referring to a 2011 date of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Academy Ball. He wore a purple velour suit jacket but without his signature baseball cap.
What excited him, he said, was not only that “this is the first time I get to play with these musicians since before COVID,” but playing “in a place with such a pristine acoustic environment.”
Then he took a seat with an acoustic guitar for the first segment of the show, devoted to Seven Psalms, his 2024 EP which — as he explained to the audience unfamiliar with his new music — is a 33 minute continuously-flowing suite that, after an intermission, would be followed by a longer stretch full of the hits they came to hear.
With the aid of the ensemble that included guitarists Mark Stewart and Gyan Riley, percussionist Jamey Haddad, and drummers Steve Gadd and Matt Chamberlain, Simon sang in a voice that operates in a lower register than in his heyday.
But it remains an expressive and more-than-adequate instrument to explore Simon’s spiritual queries and musings on mortality. On Thursday, they were brought to bear in delicate, detailed, and remarkably uncluttered arrangements that always placed the singer at the center of the action.
“Tears and flowers dry over time, memory leaves us melody and rhyme,” he sang in the opening section called “The Lord,” a motif that recurred. Later, he considered finite human existence in “Your Forgiveness.”
Is it really just “two billion heartbeats and out”?
And in “Trail of Volcanoes,” Simon sang, “We’re all walking down the same road, to wherever it ends,” rhyming with “the damage that’s done, leave so little time for amends.”
By 9 o’clock, the new stuff had earned a standing ovation and was out of this way. Twenty minutes later, Simon was back, this time with a hat and wearing jeans and getting right to it with “Graceland,” which prominently featured the fluid bass playing of South African musician Bakithi Kumalo from the original Graceland band.
Along with Brickell, Kumalo was the only band member Simon introduced by name, though several times he did gesture for the audience to acknowledge solos by players such as flutist Nancy Stagnita, and sax player and Cheltenham native Andy Snitzer.
The second set — 85 minutes, including three encore songs — was indeed full of hits, but also well selected lesser knowns dear to Simon’s heart. Many were rendered with new meaning in context of the existential first set, and all were slightly tweaked without betraying the original’s essence.
“Homeward Bound,” one of three Simon and Garfunkel songs to make the set list, resonates more deeply with each tour that may indeed be the last. “God only knows, God makes his plan,” Simon sang in a 1977 hit that nods to Brian Wilson. “We believe we’re gliding down the highway, when in fact we’re slip slidin’ away.”
Simon also took care to include “The Late Great Johnny Ace,” from his 1983 album Hearts & Bones. The song about the “Pledging My Love” R&B singer who died of a self-inflicted bullet wound in 1954, also played as a tribute of John Lennon and, more awkwardly, to John F. Kennedy.
Standouts in the second set included “Train In The Distance,” an elegantly turned song about the dissolution of a marriage, also from Hearts & Bones. And Simon is right to want to spotlight the sharp-minded “Rewrite,” a 2011 song about creative revision in art and life.
Two songs from 1990’s Rhythm of the Saints — “Spirit Voices” and “Cool, Cool River” — sparkled with vibrant, vivid polyrhythms, making the argument that that follow-up to the celebrated Graceland is unjustly overshadowed by its predecessor.
The “Quiet Celebration” tour impressively demonstrates how a devotion to restless forward momentum has resulted in an epic and ongoing pop music career.
To finish off the evening though, Simon reached back in time to a trio of boomer benchmarks in a finger-snapping “50 Ways To Leave Your Lover” and two Simon and Garfunkel songs in “The Boxer” and “The Sound of Silence.”
The latter was solo acoustic, with Simon alone on stage after being called back by an appreciative audience showering him with affection.
But it was the former that best exemplified its creator’s spirit as a half-century old song about a pugilist who can’t help but keeps climbing back in the ring:
“I am leaving, I am leaving: But the fighter still remains.”