Mark Lowrey is a trained classical and jazz pianist, but he's also a big rock fan. Tonight at the RecordBar, he will show his love for Radiohead, with the help of about 16 other local musicians. But "Mark Lowrey Presents: Radiohead Tribute" isn't your normal tribute show. Read more below:

The project he has been planning for a few years will finally hit the stage this weekend, and Mark Lowrey is having a mild case of “be careful what you wish for.”

On Friday night at the RecordBar, he will lead a cast of 17 local musicians and vocalists in “Mark Lowrey Presents: Radiohead Tribute,” two hours of homage to one of the world’s most revered rock bands. This won’t be the normal tribute show either; Lowrey and several friends have rearranged the band’s music into something completely different — something otherworldly.

“We’re doing modern rock songs in several different contexts: chamber music context or Afro-Cuban, traditional Brazilian — styles that were defined long before Radiohead was a band,” he said. “We will preserve the basic structures of the songs — the melodies — but rearrange them. So people will need to be open-minded about them.”

Lowrey has been playing Radiohead songs for years, in his solo-piano gigs at various jazz clubs around town and with jazz singer Shay Estes, his longtime vocal partner.

“Shay has been doing ‘Talk Show Host’ from the ‘Romeo and Juliet’ soundtrack for years,” Lowrey said. “That’s one of the songs we already had arrangements for.

“Shay and I have wanted to do this for a long time because the band is so monumental and so important to both of us. I feel like I now have the resources to do it, meaning I was ready as an artist to take this on and I was able to convince some of the finest artists in town to join me.”

That group of fellow artists is a who’s who of local music talent from many genres, including all of Lowrey’s teammates in the Barclay Martin Ensemble and Trio ALL: Rick Willoughby, Giuliano Mingucci, Zack Albetta and Ben Leifer. There will also be a string quartet featuring Laurel Morgan of In the Pines and the Quixotic orchestra. Vocalists will include Estes, Barclay Martin, Billy Smith and Enrique Chi, who will perform several numbers in Spanish.

The set list will comprise about 20 songs, Lowrey said, including one whose arrangement was still in the final stages early this week, “Idioteque.” He used that as an example of how he approached this project.

“The broad concept of that song is this,” he said, pounding out a rhythm on a table top. “It’s got a hard-core, straight-up drum-heavy rock beat that plays between half-time and double-time. The song is limited in tonality — well, I mean there aren’t a million chord changes like in Coltrane. It has moments where there is voice and drums only. It got me thinking of a tempo like a rumba or a clave and it wasn’t hard to find the commonalities and connect the dots and turn the song into an Afro-Cuban piece. It’s not that far of a stretch.”

Some of the rearrangements are true to the original versions, he said, but even those that stray stick to the original idea of the song.

“We don’t change the melody or the lyrics,” he said. “That said, there are times when the approach gets whimsical, you’ll notice that the semantics have been played with. I’m an instrumental musician so I didn’t necessarily think first of lyrical content. But when it’s all done, the hope is you’ll recognize the essence of the original.

“And I am in no way the only arranger. Laurel and Rick and Barclay did their own thing,” he said. “And some of us got together and bounced around some ideas. I relied heavily on the skills and ideas of the other musicians.”

This isn’t Lowrey’s first tribute project. He was in the band that performed in the re-creation of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall.” And last year he conducted his own tribute to Ben Folds, a show of more modest ambitions.

“We gave the vocalists on that project some leeway because we wanted them to sing like themselves and not try to emulate the nasally Ben Folds thing,” he said, “but the songs were really true to themselves. This time, we’re turning the music on its ear.”

That turning process has taught him even more about a band he loves, Lowrey said.

“I really nerded-out on a lot of their music,” he said. “It’s lofty, but accessible. You don’t even think about how complex it is because it flows so easily. Little of it is divisible by four or eight.

“Like ‘Reckoner’ on ‘In Rainbows.’ Rick helped me figure that out. It’s written in these five-bar phrases. It seems like the song is always restarting in different places. It’s not like most Western music, written in 12 bars, like Elvis did. And they play lots of little tricks with the form, like the way the bass player might add a subtle reharmonizing the sixth time out of seven. A lot of the beauty is in the details.”

He admitted he is wondering how some of those details will come across in the RecordBar, one of the city’s premier rock clubs.

“Some people may be disappointed because the music won’t rock like they want it to,” he said. “It’s going to be more chilled. It’s not exactly Radiohead unplugged, but it’s definitely more organic than the original material. If we get a full RecordBar and there’s a string quartet playing — it can be a fine line in a rock club.”

He expects some people won’t navigate that fine line and may not appreciate what he and his band have accomplished. But he’s ready for that and is focused on the real responsibility: to do it all well.

“I hope people keep an open mind about it,” he said. “I think the die-hard fans, if they don’t listen to a lot of jazz or classical music, they may not appreciate it.

“I hope no one thinks it’s an abomination, but I know we’re not going to sell everyone on it. Our basic responsibility is to not suck. That’s always the goal, but it feels like this time it’s even more important.”

Tonight
“Mark Lowrey Presents: Radiohead Tribute” begins at 10 p.m. at the RecordBar, 1020 Westport Road. Tickets are $10 in advance, $12 at the door.

| Timothy Finn, The Star

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