HPR Spotlight: Rodeo kicks off with wild night of Tom Waits tunes performed with homemade instruments

L'orchestre d'hommes-orchestres kicked off the 40th High Performance Rodeo Thursday at the Bella with Performs Tom Waits.

I’m sorry to say I’ve never seen Tom Waits live in concert, but I’ll never forget seeing Performs Tom Waits either.

The 40th High Performance Rodeo officially kicked off Thursday night at the Bella, on a stage that looked like the set of Sanford and Son.

That was the wonderful 1970s sitcom starring Red Foxx as a south LA junkman who lived in a cluttered house full of found wonders from the neighbourhood, and if you’d just taken a wrong turn walking around the MRU campus Thursday night in the gale-force north winds, you could have sworn Fred was doing the sets for Performs Tom Waits, a quirky concert that pays musical tribute to one of the true American musical originals.

There was a random ladder onstage, the kind the guy who hangs the lights from the ceiling uses. There was a 12-inch television set. A rickety-looking baby stroller. Garden shears. A guitar that appeared to fashioned out of a cardboard box. A trumpet. A banjo. And two women dressed conservatively in outfits that made them look like extras from a Chesterfield cigarettes ad from the 1950s.

“Welcome to the 40th High Performance Rodeo,” said artistic producer Oliver Armstrong. “And welcome back to L’Orchestre de L’Homme-orchestres (LODHO). If it’s your first time seeing them, it’s going to be weird!”

Then the band -- it bills itself on its website as a performance art laboratory, founded in 2002 in Quebec City as a collection of musicians, painters, and artists who collaborated on projects --came out and sang “Rains on Me”, a growly, gritty blues tune that sounded great in the acoustic wonder that is the Bella.

“If this is your first time to one of our shows, don’t panic,” said Bruno Bouchard one of the musicians.

“You’ll get used to it.”

You do get used to it. LODHO have a kind of home-made, one-man band sensibility to making music. The stage is cluttered with people and stuff, all of which is fair game to double as an instrument, and everyone in the band has a great set of pipes, in which to perform Waits tunes such as “I’ll Shoot the Moon,” “All the World is Green” and “I Don’t Want to Grow Up.”

“This is the first song I ever wrote,” said Bouchard. “Except I didn’t write it.”

Then he pulled out a tiny toy piano and tinkled out the melody.

There’s yodelling, accordian playing, magnificent percussion and lots of great guitar to accompany the singers’ guttural growls at Performs Tom Waits, which was produced in co-production with the Calgary Folk Festival and the Taylor Centre for the Performing Arts.

I kept flashing back to O Brother Where Art Thou? the bluegrassy, Depression-era Coen Brothers film starring George Clooney -- only the Canadian version.

It’s a little sweeter and more playful and weirdly engaging, just like the High Performance Rodeo itself, which has actually changed Calgary.

One Yellow Rabbit started its experimental international theatre festival in 1986 and now we have Chinook Blast, a winter arts festival that is really the municipal love child of the High Performance Rodeo and its devoted followers, who were out in full throat Thursday night and figure to be filling parking garages, bars and restaurants downtown for the rest of the month.

Performs Tom Waits runs through Saturday at the Bella.

The High Performance Rodeo runs through Jan. 31 at various venues across the city.