Showing posts with label klinkende munt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label klinkende munt. Show all posts

Monday, July 09, 2007

Klinkende Munt Day 4 - 07/07/07@Beursschouwburg, Brussels



Ah, dear old Klinkende Munt (reports from previous editions), where a saxophonist's wails compete with the cries of children running around, where bass solos coexist with the chatter of grandmothers eating shish kebabs and where a bandleader's announcements compete with the general indifference of the free festival crowd. While a less numerologically significant event than The Boredoms' 77BoaDrum, at least we were lucky enough not to have any of the usual weirdo drunkards drop by.

Atomic (website)
Fredrik Ljungkvist - ts, cl
Magnus Broo - tp
Havard Wiik - p
Ingebrigt Haker Flaten - b
Paal Nilssen-Love - d

I've been listening to the Norwegian-Swedish Atomic for a few years, since their first two albums Feet Music and Boom Boom. Several of its members, Paal Nilssen-Love and Ingebrit Haker-Flaten (the first time Frederik Ljungevist pronounced the bassist's name, he made it sound like an adventure) in particular, are among Ken Vandermark's many regular collaborators.

Like a few other Scandanavian bands such as Exploding Customer (myspace), Firehouse or Jonas Kullhammar's (myspace) Nacka Forum (myspace), Atomic is very much attached to the idea of being recognisable as a jazz quintet, but injects into that format lots of post-free jazz American avant-garde language that prevent things from simply chugging along. I just got The Thing's (Nilssen-Love, Haker Flaten and Mats Gustafsson) Action Jazz, which, though more given to open blowing, could fit in with the others. In Atomic's case, even when they get boisterous, the free playing is always embedded in an overarching structure, made visible when the band shifts gears in tight formation (is that a mixed metaphor?). Interestingly, they all sound fairly American to me, in any case far removed from any "sound of the fjords" clichés and other elements that I tend to associate with European jazz/improv (to be really simplistic about it, maybe it's just that they all swing, in some way or other). They are what I like to call "hot jazz for a new millenium," but most of the time I have enough sense to keep that appellation to myself.

On the set's first piece, solos were sandwiched by heads, but each one received a radically different treatment: rumbling mid-tempo swing for an explosive Fredrik Ljungkvist, a quasi-dirge for a thoughtful Magnus Broo and a langourous ballad feel for Havard Wiik to subtly disrupt with dissonance. Themes were stated in conventional front-line unisons, but Wiik almost never comped or played lines in a regular manner. Instead, he covered vast expanses and created dense, rippling textures. On the set-closing ballad "Kerosene," he split the difference by first doling out chords under the saxophonist's tender, soft-focus solo, and then engaging Nilssen-Love in a duet that gathered dark clouds before growing into an all-encompassing storm.

As the concert progressed, the repertoire increasingly broke away from traditional forms in favour of more involved, ad hoc ones. Paal Nilssen-Love toned down his usual busy, powerful playing for a quiet feature that had clarinet and trumpet tones floating underneath and between his desolate cymbal screeches and distant mallet hits. Later, Ljungkvist got into a Jimmy Giuffre-ish mood, issuing terse fragments that got loud in very short spurts.

On "Two Boxes Left," a deranged, absurdist fanfare theme gave way to a twittering front-line dialogue that stopped to allow Haker Flaten to shred his bow his a furious, high-register arco solo accompanied by comically short, Ljungkvist-conducted punctuations from the rest of the band. It was like a sudden injection of Dutch comedy - a Southern glance in an otherwise Westwards-looking set.

Byron Wallen (myspace)
Byron Wallen - tp, conch, fl
Julian Siegal - ts, bcl
Larry Bartley - b
Tom Skinner - d
Boujemaa Boubul - voc, guembri, perc,

Byron Wallen is a fluent British trumpeter, clearly steeped in the hot-blooded hard bop of Freddie Hubbard and others, but also willing to explore sounds both harsher and more exotic. His front-line partner Julian Siegal preferred to keep a more even-keeled tone as he spun harmonically involved lines. On "Merry-Go-Round," the two intertwined melodically over a sunny beat like a Gerry Mulligan Quartet gone Carribbean.

For part of the set, they invited Boujemaa Boubul, a Gnawa musician, to join them on guembri, qraqeb and occasional singing. His characteristic dancing, polyrhythmic 6/8 grooves created a new baseline for the group, but also a new challenge. Wallen slipped naturally into this new context: he emerged from the groove and used it as a reference even when he freed himself from it, and added flute and conch shell to the more prayerful moments. Wallen's current album, Meeting Ground, is apparently about jazz-Gnawa fusion and his playing truly made the meeting happen. Siegal, however, stuck to his harmony-oriented playing and ended up sounding pasted on to the music, rather than a part of it. His more textural bass clarinet fit in better, though.

Jeremy Warmsley (myspace)

Jeremy Warmsley's dramatic pop put elaborate construction, literary lyrics and lots of falsetto leaps in the place of catchy hooks and a memorable voice. Songs had titles such as "The Young Man Sees the City as a Chessboard" and content such as accidentally watching pornography (he said pornography, not porn - the distinction seemed important) on French TV ("Which is easy to do," Warmsley stated in his defense), played in a four-handed piano arrangement, which must be a rarity in the world of indie-rock. Words created uncertainty by their content as well as their quantity, as in "I Keep the City Burning for You," where he sang:

I keep the city burning for you
Beacon to guide you home
Furnace to keep you warm
Smoke to poison your lungs
All the ingredients of a great relationship, then.

They did ecstatically rock out on one tune. The strange thing about it is that I developed an unusual physical reaction: I sneezed throughout the song, then stopped as soon as it did. Perhaps it was a sudden, temporary (I hope) allergy to ecstatically rocking out?

While I've never been a fan of oversize hip hop clothing, neither can I understand the show-your-socks-small jeans indie guys like Warmsely wear. His bassist, who I'd issue a blipster warning on if I worked for the NY Times, was supremely cool, though.

Gary Lucas was scheduled to perform with a DJ at 12:15 AM, but in a sign of encroaching age, I didn't feel like waiting.

Saturday, July 08, 2006

Klinkende Munt Day 3 - 07/07/06, Brussels

Kurt Van Herck Trio
Van Herck is a near-ubiquitous saxophone player, with the Brussels Jazz Orchestra for instance, but he rarely leads his own groups. His last album came out 10 years ago. His new album (which, coincidentally, was waiting for me when I got home) is in trio with guitarist Jacques Pirotton and drummer Mimi Verderame, playing the unrecorded compositions of Karl Van Deun, a barely known guitarist. It's almost the Herbie Nichols Project, on a Belgian scale (and Van Deun is alive and well). The sparsely populated tent wasn't exactly the best environment for this music, what with kids running around, people moving in and out, a basketball tournament outside, etc. Still, what I managed to hear (I got there late) was unexpectedly good, but I'll listen to the CD before discussing it further.




The Bad Plus
I had high hopes - very high hopes - for this one, which were easily surpassed. If anyone invites a blow-by-blow review, it's TBP, so I apologise in advance for what's to come.

The concert was insane, as in insanely good, but also as in "TBP is crazy!" On the left, you had Ethan Iverson, generally cool as ice behind the piano or dead-panning these incredible spoken introductions that must be at least partly improvised or embellished, because even his bandmates were laughing. The intro to "1980 World Champion" was particularly good, involving Lyle Mays (not Lyle Mays), a ski jumping world champion from Ann Arbor, Michigan, who celebrated his title every day by dancing in the street. On the right, you had Dave King, whose body movements have to be seen to be believed. I guess he has a reputation as a banger, but he's actually more likely to be making a subtle kind of clatter. And then, in the middle you had Reid Anderson, the dapper bassist. What they do as a group is even more impressive live than on record: you can really see how they fit bits of improv into the the manic arrangements' interstices. And, of course, there's the random stuff thrown out apparently just to keep people guessing, such as the brief groovy soul bass solo that served as coda King's "Thrift Store Jewelery," totally unrelated to the modest melody and Latin undertow of the body of the song.

They played a lot of new, unrecorded songs. Ethan's concert-opening "Mint" continually seemed to have two things going on at once, and juxtaposed a dozen more, starting with some great abstract piano blues. Reid is an awesome composer, whose pieces tend to have a rock song feel to them. The first encore, "Physical Cities," was the biggest and best of them: it switched between ascending piano arpeggios over a hard-driving riff and a stabbing hip hop groove. The downshift from the stomping latter to the low-lying former was particularly delicious. And then, out of nowhere, came this unison morse code staccato section, with lots of dramatic rests. Imagine the rhythm of a Tim Berne composition, played on one note. It might have lasted 90 seconds, but what was so thrilling about it was that I truly had no idea how long it would go on, or what would come next (which happened to be a massive beat based on the morse code).

"Casa Particular," another unrecorded tune, surprised - shocked, even - by staying in one engrossingly low-key place throughout: King pushed forward relentlessly, but on brushes and very quietly (I was reminded of Jorge Rossy on the version of "Exit Music (For A Film)" on Mehldau's Art of the Trio: vol. 4), while the piano drifted and dreamt prettily. "1980 World Champion," like "1972 Bronze Medallist" before it, set up big, simple chords and then sprinkled them with dissonance. Here, though, it was done over a fast 2-beat that, when King picked up a tambourine and Ethan played some blues, lent the song a fervent gospel feel.



Of course, TBP is loved and hated for their covers (even though I generally find their originals more rewarding). Their versions of Interpol's "Narc" and Bacharach's "This Guy's In Love With You" had some common ground: sweeping crescendos leading to a big chorus, for example. The Bacharach was the more sarcastic one: a subdued 12/8 led to faux cocktail piano; sleigh bells comically accented a break. Ornette Coleman's "Song X" (I don't have that album, must get it) started with the melody played in trio unison three times, with yawning chasms of silence in between. This led to fast Ornette-ish swing, open and rambunctious, and the most traditionally-configured piano solo + rhythm section passage of the concert. What happened next was, therefore, totally unexpected. Reid subverted the song twice: first by playing a slow and relatively melodic solo, then, as he stuck ultra-quietly and minimally to a couple of high-register notes, King rubbed a whining, blinking toy on his floor tom. Deploying near-silence against a somewhat talkative crowd was bold and brilliant. Well, it all seemed subsersive to me, and on a tune by the nec plus ultra in jazz subversiveness, no less!

Finally, the second encore (concerts in the tent usually struggle to get one encore, so it's a tribute to TBP that they could easily have gotten a third, if the organisers hadn't wrapped it up) was "Chariots Of Fire," as requested by an audience member. Some people don't like this cover, but I think the superposition of the theme, played at varying tempos, and an unrelated funky bass line really works. Also, the way it opens up into a scrambling free section reminds me of my all-time favourite TBP cover, Blondie's "Heart Of Glass" on These Are The Vistas. Here, Ethan started the song standing stock-still, staring unblinkingly out into space and playing a few notes with his hand behind his back. Those theatrical touches are fantastic and really help them communicate with the audience. Both times Ethan named the band members, they'd play fragments of a theme music: silly, but great fun.

Afterwards, we had a jazzblogger tripartite summit (not quite Yalta, but almost?) with Ethan and Jazzques at the Archiduc, laughing and discussing everything from Brad Mehldau to hip hop to blogging to TBP itself to writing/reading about music to the virtues and advantages of the siesta and many other things I'm forgetting. Reid and sound man/engineer/designer Michael (I think) joined us later. Excellent times. One interesting thing I hadn't really realised was the extent to which Ethan is a jazz kid. Do The Math hints at that, but I'd always assumed he started out from a classical and contemporary music background, but not at all. On a personal note, there was absolutely none of the awkwardness you usually get around visiting musicians, who are, essentially, people you've never met before. Maybe it's Ethan's sense of midwest hospitality or something.

Friday, July 07, 2006

Klinkende Munt 2006 Day 2 - 06/07/2006, Brussels


I skipped day 1 to watch France qualify for the World Cup final. Priorities.

Acoustic Ladyland
The band name initially faithfully represented its music: modern post-bop jazz covers of Hendrix tunes. To be honest, it was a little boring. Between their first and second albums, they morphed into an instrumental rock-almost-punk band. Last Chance Disco is really good and fun. Now, it would seem that they've morphed fully into a punk band. The ingredients remain similar (Pete Wareham's rough-hewn tenor saxophone wailing and declaiming of simple, punchy riffs, Tom Cawley's finely-textured keyboards, Tom Herbert's pared-down electric bass and Seb Rocheford's drumming, either everything-at-once punk or beats with more room to breathe), but there's more singing by Wareham, more decibels and more wall-of-sound-ness, especially on the new songs that will be on their upcoming album (or maybe I just haven't listened to Last Chance Disco loud enough).

I tend to prefer their songs that are less dense and have more rhythm, so I was a bit disappointed there weren't more of them. At those times, Cawley's crucial contributions became clear. At the band's loudest, the sound system struggled with the volume: the saxophone was often a bit lost in the mass and the keyboards weren't very clear.

Afterwards, I discussed MySpace (a recurring theme, it would turn out) with Tom H. and the Hnita's Peter Anthonissen. Teun showed up and informed me that Jef had signed with Universal Music (Belgium).

Clotaire K
The highlight of this concert was when a guy came on stage wearing a skull mask, Freddy Krueger claws, a black t-shirt and shiny suit era pants and danced around, mock-attacking the other band members. Apart from that, it was semi-convincing 10 year old IAM with a dash of North African influences. It didn't help that the front man kept on berating the crowd, even though little of what they were doing deserved wild enthusiasm. At one point, the DJ would scratch for 5 seconds, then stop, and applause would be demanded. Over and over...



Soweto Kinch
I was eagerly awaiting this one, as I'd never seen Kinch live and really like Conversations With The Unseen. I'll get the disappointing parts out of the way first. One, the repertoire was mostly taken from the two year old album, but in virtually identical arrangements. While "Snake Hips"'s pot-pourri is still pleasant to hear, I expected far more deviation from the record. Two, it was more traditional than I expected. So there were a lot of solos that failed to really matter. Kinch is unabashedly a bop-derived alto player, which isn't a problem - it actually highlights and enhances the newer hip hop elements he brings in - but while he's got plenty of technique, too often I didn't feel like I was getting more than that. Now for the good stuff.

Kinch is a super-charismatic stage presence: funny, spontaneous, outgoing, charming. He's a good rapper and an excellent lyricist. "Jazz Planet" has a cheesy concept (what if jazz was the dominant music?), but the words and flow make it work: "What if jazz could solve world wars/And swinging on 2 and 4 was a government law," a bit about boy bands scuffling for work and lip-synching being a dying artform practiced only at summer camps in Dartmoor (Dartmouth?), DJs sitting back at concerts and muttering about jazz musicians stealing all the gigs, etc. "Adrian" started out as a fairly traditional bop ballad, but in the middle, Kinch rapped mesmerisingly, at a slow tempo and with just the bass as accompaniment, about the song's hapless, tragic hero. Before going off stage, Kinch requested six words from the audience for a freestyle. They were: North Korea, peace, cables, fever, hip hop and bebop. Kinch linked them all together impressively and imaginatively, with each key word preceded by 3-4 lines that allowed it to arrive naturally and climactically.

The encore was "A Friendly Game Of Basketball," by far the best instrumental piece. After a ricocheting head, trumpeter/singer Abram Wilson took a solo that started to bring the energy level up, Kinch and drummer Troy Miller then proceeded to engage in the most hard-driving uptempo improvising of the night. It was fantastic, but at a level they should have reached after a few songs, not right at the end.

More photos here (wardrobe alert: I have the same blue short-sleeve shirt the bassist is wearing, and might even have worn it yesterday if I didn't need to sow a button back on).

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Klinkende Munt Days 3 & 4 - 09,10/07/2005, Brussels

The photostream continues.

Beursschouwburg
The Beursschowburg contains two main spaces. On the second floor, there's the concert hall, a drab shoebox with black drapes hanging from the walls, and much smaller than you'd expect. Around it is folded a structure that twists unpredictably and space-wastingly on itself. Masochism seems to drive the architecture: speckled beige carpeted floors, destined to be trampled, muddied and splotched, inaccessible dead space, walls painstakingly made to look unfinished or deteriorated.

going up

Oddly, it's only on the ground floor that the rest of the structure becomes comprehensible. I say "oddly," because the main access leads directly to the second floor and because to get to the ground floor (which is where the bar and informal stage are), you need to exit the building and go one door up the street. Here, there are open, rational spaces (which is probably why they are so hidden) that maternally encase the tortuous upper floors. A charming place.

Day 3

The BBB

Ori Kaplan's Balkan Beat Box: "From New York and Tel-Aviv" a Masada for the post-hip hop/panglobal/DJ era. Drummer Tamir Muskat launches pre-recorded beats spanning hip hop, dub, 80s staccato drum machines, pounding rock or rocking dance from his laptop, and sometimes peppers them with vocals (Jewish schoolgirl playground chants? his own vocals processed and looped in real-time? a bit of both?), to great effect. The drums are almost just a prop to kick the whole thing into a furious overdrive at crucial points. The horns blare middle-Eastern melodies and exhort the crowd to scream and jump; the handlebar-mustachioed guitarist laconically distributes Israeli-rock solos; the mohawked singer/Mc/percussionist is insane and keeps the crowd energised, crowd-surfs to celebrate his success, shuffles along the thin platform that extends under the drapes for drama. "This one is for the children of Ramallah and Tel-Aviv," he says. Yet, the beat is more unstoppable machine than tender lullaby. The straight-to-the-point, relentless dancefloor music is interrupted only when Hassan is introduced. He takes a voice 'n' guembri solo, then picks up those hand cymbal things used to create the typical 6/8 pattern, and joins the band for Arabic-flavoured mania. Hassan's hat has a cord with a ball of cloth at the end of it, which swings non-stop as he plays. Awesome. By the end of the concert, calves ache, voice is hoarse. I haven't had this much fun at a concert in a while.

Day 4

Abdelhak Raha DJ Rupture

Nettle (DJ/Rupture and Abdelhak Raha on violin and oud) constitutes a radical departure from the breezy fanfares of previous days. "Violin and DJ" can seem odd, taken in isolation, but isn't, really, in context. When Raha plays the violin upright on his knee, the earlier technological assimilation is made clear, and it's sort of the same kind of thing as having the violin's sound processed by the DJ. When the Arabic community that had come early claps along to familiar melodies, the cultural subtext I'm missing is made concrete and coincidentally reveals Nettle's concept to be not all that different to that of popular crossover artists like Khaled. Or to that of many jazz musicians, who keep techniques created for the dancefloor even as they move away from it, which allows for exciting oscillations between the two poles.

Want a tower?

Nass El Ghiwane is apparently a legendary and politically radical Moroccan group from the '70s and 80's. I'll admit to having been more interested in the crowd's sociology than in the music. The first dozen or so rows were overwhelmingly Moroccan, young and male. They knew all the lyrics and reacted with an almost unsettling fervour, carrying each other on their shoulders and so on. Further back, the crowd became more European, feminine and observational. After about 45 minutes I'd had enough and went for a walk.

Pest

Pest sounded good on paper (Ninja Tune, cellist...), but turned out to be merely serviceable medium funk of the post-hip hop/acid jazz variety. The Fender Rhodes played its creamy chords and the guitarist unfurled a few good solos, the DJ/rapper livened things up from time to time and everybody danced a bit, eventually, but compared to the BBB's furore, it was all rather tame.

I dropped by the Kawa Jaipur Brassband's concert in the bar, but it was too hot and crowded. So I went and sat on the steps of the Bourse (Stock Exchange). It's a bit of a hotspot: it connects the touristy Grand'Place to the trendy Halles St-Géry and marks the northern limit of the Moroccan Gare de Midi area. It's an interesting place to eat a beef durum and drink a peach Bacardi Breezer late into a saturday night.

Friday, July 08, 2005

Klinkende Munt Day 2: Prelude and Dances - 07/07/2005, Brussels



I left work ridiculously early, affording me time to go back home and watch coverage of the London bombings: a terrible Western glimpse into daily life in Baghdad. As always, I'm torn between sadness for the victims and cynicism as to the credibility of declarations by Mssrs. Blair and Bush: denouncements of callousness and disdain for human life are hard to stomach, coming from those two.

seen on Antoine Dansaert

The trip back into town was happier than the thoughts above would have you think, even though I was bothered by my ill-advised wolfing down of two bowls of cereal. Going to the Nouveau Marché au Grains takes me further down Antoine Dansaert than usual, well past the Archiduc's art déco stylings and by all the chic, semi-underground designer boutiques. Sure, they're expensive, but the clothes are awesome. The festival's main tent is the bottom edge of a rectangle formed by the World Market's smaller tents. In the middle, there's a basketball court. One can buy food, jewellery and random stuff, or discover Kif Kif radio and their photos of the event.

some of the weird things on display at the World Market

The line-up and mp3s. My Klinkende Munt photo stream.

Marockin' Brass

Puns as band names are always dubious, and Marockin' Brass, who kicked off the festivities, is no exception. At least the name announces the aim clearly: horns over Moroccan percussion. Interestingly, altoist Cesariusz Gadzina, who released a good saxophone-bass-drums trio album early last year, is part of the band, and provided what was easily the most interesting soloing of all the musicians I've seen so far. It's fairly fun music, but too often the rhythm simply percolates somewhat disconnectedly behind the horns (the key word being behind). This is emphasised when the percussionists take off on their own, turning towards each other, increasing in intensity until finally antique brass instruments (like those long, valveless trumpets used in films set in the Middle Ages) let loose barely-articulate blasts.

merry-making during Cor de la Plana

Cor de la Plana is a six-man a cappella (apart from a couple of frame drums) vocal group from Marseille that sings Occitan songs. Their subtle and highly sophisticated use of polyphony creates a multi-layered sound in which who is producing what is, at times, dizzingly unclear. The music seems to tap into something ancient, rewriting popular clichés as it brings together reminiscences of both Gregorian and African chanting and rhythms, along with the old Italian and Arabo-Anadalucian influences that have traversed Occitan culture over the centuries. A farandole set off long lines of people dancing, hands joined, the likes of which hasn't been seen since, well, the Middle Ages. It's amazing the energy you can generate just sitting in a semi-circle, clapping your hands and stomping your feet.

PICT1225The action shifted to the Beursschouwburg's main building, a short walk back up Antoine Dansaert, for La Panika, a Bulgarian orchestra that plays the kind of Balkanic music made popular by Emir Kusturica's films. An incredible, festive explosion of more-faster saxophone/trumpet/clarinet/accordeon solos (a milder form of free-jazz glossolalia?) and wedding melodies over a solid four-man heavy brass section (I've seen three sousaphone players in two days, a decidedly odd occurrence. La Panika's elephant sousaphone was impressive, though) that even included a Wagner tuba and a snare 'n' bass drum team. The relentless tempos were broken up by the occasional (and very successful) dirge, as well as a young dancer in red. The crowd, needless to say, loved it, especially as a few Bulgarians turned up to lead the Belgian masses.

The festival is organised by the Beursschouwburg's idiosyncraticly-dressed director, and I've never seen someone take on so many roles at once: announcing bands, directing traffic, mingling with the audience, filming a concert and even serving beer to the musicians on stage.

the youngest member of La Panika, snazzily dressed - white shoes!

I had to leave a bit before the end of La Panika's concert, therefore missing Brad Shepik's organ trio... Despite another disappointment (after missing Soulive yesterday) I'm still determined to see Ori Kaplan's Balkan Beatbox tonight, despite a prior restaurant engagement earlier in the evening. And saturday's line-up looks promising, too, as well as edgier. And then there's Brosella on sunday. And then the work week starts again.

Thursday, July 07, 2005

Klinkende Munt Day 1 - 06/07/2005

The line-up.

Fanfares/marching bands have enjoyed renewed popularity for the last few years, seemingly on both sides of the Atlantic (Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Youngblood Brass Band, "Lose My Breath," "Hollaback Girl") and this year's Klinkende Munt (clinking coins?) festival will feature a lot of them. Except that over here, we don't really go for the brass button and big hat thing. The Orchestre International du Vetex marched into the tent (a judicious choice by the organisers, as it was raining and will be raining throughout the festival), remained at audience-level throughout their concert and immediately set the tone: joyous westernised Balkanic music, with hints of North Africa. A limited palette of fast to medium tempos and short hooky riffs, but irresistably popular and dancey. The brass (two trumpets, fluegelhorn, trombone) and rhythm (snare, bass drum, cymbals) dominated the other instruments (two flutes, two saxophones and that wraparound tuba thing). There was, of course, the drunk guy staggering around that inevitably appears at events of this kind. There's also only ever one of them at a time, so I wonder if there's a kind of Highlander thing going on, with catastrophic consequences if two should meet.

Orchestre International du Vetex

Antibalas came on next, serving up the Fela-derived Afrobeat expected of them: barely-finite songs that are essentially variations on a groove and horn riff, an impenetrably dense rhythmic backdrop (two guitars), harmonically simple, syncopated keyboard solos (with the same sound as Fela), sloganeering and dancing singer/percussionist, etc. I love the occasional gunshot snare hit (kind of like in reggae) that replaces the usual crash cymbal, which can't really be heard in the morass. But overall, it's too cloying and undifferentiated a meal; surprisingly undanceable (as opposed to merely a vague swaying), too.

I wanted to see Soulive, but having had only a few hours sleep the night before and facing a string of short nights (I definitely want to see Brad Shepik (with Tom Rainey!), tonight, and that starts at midnight), IVN and I headed home towards the end of Antibalas's set.