Improvising, in Truest Sense of the Word

By JON CARAMANICA



 The most important member of Rhonda Vincent’s touring troupe on Thursday night turned out not to be her fiddle player or her bassist but her bus driver. Sometime during the afternoon, while the band was already in Manhattan, he got into an accident in the Lincoln Tunnel. The instruments, the stage outfits, the merchandise: none of it made it to Joe’s Pub by showtime.


And so Ms. Vincent and her band, the Rage, took the stage anyway, instruments on loan for everyone except Ms. Vincent, whose hands looked agitated not wrapped around her mandolin.


This made for a night that was less a concert than a metamorphosis, the band shifting through phases from flustered and making do to slick and professional as, over the course of the evening, fortune swung back its way.


In the beginning its members were game improvisers. Mickey Harris strummed an electric bass instead of his usual upright. And being instrumentless had some advantages for Ms. Vincent: it left her hand free to make a cute gun-shooting motion during “In the Garden by the Fountain,” a sinister new song — on record, it’s a duet with Dolly Parton, whom Ms. Vincent has clearly studied — about how to deal with a reluctant lover: “Then I reached inside my pocket/What happened next I can never tell.” The full story, a must read, in the N Y Times