Pop Music Reviews : Ziggy Marley Wins ‘Em Over at the Palladium

Rock and R & B fans can be tough to win over, but there’s almost no such thing as a “show me” reggae audience. On Wednesday night, a Palladium theatre full of sweaty humanity, much of it wearing dreadlocks and T-shirts emblazoned with Rastafarian iconography (and that was just the white fans), was won over from the moment Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers took the stage.

Fronted by the children of the late reggae giant Bob Marley (this concert came on the seventh anniversary of his death), the group seemed to feel a bit inhibited by the weight of giant expectations--friendly though the expectations may have been. Ziggy Marley--who looks and sounds remarkably like his father--was the most subdued, standing in one spot for most of the hour-plus set, only coming fully alive for “Lee and Molly,” a tale of inter-racial affection driven on Wednesday by lashing, Santana-like guitar embellishment by Earl (Chinna) Smith, who also played with the elder Marley.

On that number--dancing with legs kicking high, face turned upward, arms flailing--he turned on the fiery, leonine intensity long associated with Bob Marley.

Whether singing about slave ships, apartheid or the arrogrance of presuming to “discover” new worlds and peoples, Ziggy Marley is a young man with something substantial to say. And though much of the music Wednesday stayed closer to the standard reggae forms than on the Marleys’ new “Conscious Party” album, it still showed that Ziggy has the vision to expand the boundaries of the slinky Jamaican style, a job that his pioneering father left uncompleted.