Post by Emerald City on Apr 28, 2005 16:04:37 GMT -5
Ashford and Simpson give smooth performance at Urban League event
reported by: By PAM ADAMS [Journal Star]
A REVIEW
PEORIA - There are hundreds of reasons the sounds of Motown are staples in movie soundtracks, samples in ome of rap's biggest hits and rarely more than a click away on the radio dial. Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson sang a few of those staples Saturday in a smoothly satisfying Civic Center concert at the Tri County Urban League's annual Black and White Gala. The songwriting singers, married for 30 years, have composed hits older than a good portion of the black tie audience, but that didn't stop the younger set from humming along with a generation old enough to remember when some of the duo's best-known songs came out on vinyl.
Several of the evening's high points occurred before the couple took the stage. Erma Davis, former director of Carver Community Center, was honored for her work as a founder of the Tri-County Urban League Guild. Though she could not attend because of illness, her daughter, Lisa Davis, announced she was donating $10,600 to the Urban League's program for college-bound students. The money is the remaining balance of a defunct college-bound program for girls Davis initiated. Methodist Medical Center CEO Michael Bryant also announced the medical center was donating $100,000 to the Urban League in Davis' name over the next four years.
Laraine Bryson, director of the Urban League, also honored other major contributors; State Farm Insurance Cos., Anheuser-Busch, and John and Arie Stenson. Ashford and Simpson opened with a palatable set of up-tempo love songs they wrote and recorded for themselves throughout the 1970s and 1980s, including "Found a Cure" and the steamy "It Seems to Hang On." However, with a song-writing history as illustrious as theirs, it didn't take long - two songs, to be exact - before they were singing a hit song they wrote for someone else, in this case, "The Boss," Diana Ross' first recording as a solo artist.
Though that song was nothing to call home about, they got back in the groove when Simpson soloed on "I'm Every Woman," a song they wrote that was originally recorded by Chaka Khan in 1978 then covered by Whitney Houston on "The Body Guard" soundtrack in 1993. Ashford, whose voice has gotten stronger with age, convinced an audience accustomed to the couple's easy-listening love songs that they knew how to get bluesy. With his version of Ray Charles' first big hit "Let's Go Get Stoned," Ashford taught some and reminded others that the 1961 song was also their first big hit as a songwriting team, the one that brought them to the attention of Motown's Berry Gordy Jr.
From there, they went into a crowd-pleasing medley of their contributions to Motown classics originally recorded by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell: "Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing," "Your Precious Love," and "Ain't No Mountain High Enough." "There's a lot of, lot of memories wrapped up in those songs," Simpson said. "Who knew they were going to hang around this long?" Who knew Ashford and Simpson, at 62 and 58 respectively, were going to sing and move as well as they do for so long?
