Last 3 weeks consisted of: work work, show, work work, family, jazz, work work, visiting friend, work work, golden weekend. Highlights of non-work:
1) Animal Collective at Prospect Park, 08/14: 4th time seeing em, first time in a huge venue. Weird to see em cross over into the bigtime. Youngish audience members freakin' out about Geologist wearing a headlamp, as if that's news to anybody at this point. Still, a great show. The enormous bass sound lent new power and fullness to the Merriweather jams (which I'd previously heard live in more skeletal form at Satellite Ballroom). And, contrary to some of the droney/minimal/uh boring(?) bootlegs I'd been hearing lately, this show featured a lot of noise, a lot of rhythm, a lot of energy.
2) Jason Moran and the Bandwagon at Village Vanguard, 08/22: Stunning, highly recommended. Moran and his Bandwagon group managed to link together ragtime, bebop/post-bop, funk, free jazz, gospel, soul, hip-hop into one of the most seamless blends I've heard yet in an ostensibly "jazz" group -- no mere pastiche, just try and tell me where one influence ends and the next begins. They also made fascinating use of prerecorded sounds (of Lithuanian basketball players/announcers, of a pencil writing on paper, of Adrian Piper talking about art and society). One piece cleverly inverted the old "break down" party phrase into a manifesto for clever artistry.
3) Grizzly Bear at Williamsburg Waterfront, 08/30: got there late (I was sleeping off a 24 hr call night, ugh) and couldn't get in as the place had filled up. Pretty disappointing as my friend Tim was in town at least in part to catch that show and we both missed it. That being said, the highlight was when I was standing at the 7th St entrance, got tapped on my shoulder to move over, and then Tim pointed behind me: there I saw Jay-Z and Beyonce just kind of walking by me with their surprisingly reasonable and small entourage. This has been blogged about endlessly since, but I was literally next to these folks and it was my first strange brush with celebrity up here. PS any advance word on Blueprint 3? I haven't been following the leak game lately.
4) Battles/!!!/Flying Lotus (and Pivot, who I didn't see) at Terminal 5, 09/04: Celebrating the 20th anniversary of Warp Records, the label that pretty much defined my musical upbringing in the mid-late 90's. Flying Lotus was the huge shocker of the night. I expected FlyLo (?!?) to play a set of narcoleptic, fractured post-Dilla hip-hop and instead got slamming track after track of enormously bass-heavy dubstep, strange updates on the Warp 90's sound, weird hip-hop mutant beats, and a delightful appearance by a thoroughly chopped up Amen break at the end. He was having more fun than any of the performers who'd follow and the crowd ate it up. Thoroughly recommend checking him out when he swings by yr town. !!! were on next and managed to entertain. Jury's still out on whether they're really all that into making people dance or if the dancing is just an inevitable byproduct of the fact that they seem like closet psych-rock dudes who discovered disco and split the difference. Anyway, there was dancing. Finally, Battles. Debuted some new stuff that sounded great, didn't seem to be any huge departures from their debut disc. However, they were incredibly tight and reminded me how much I loved their jams when Mirrored appeared two years ago. Much like the Animal Collective show though, it was weird being in a crowd for a band that once belonged to a scene that seemed a bit more inclusive (or am I just being nostalgic for Cville again?). Example: the guy behind me who got really angry when I was idly clapping an afro-cuban rhythm to the beat. He talked some trash so I turned around and lectured him on 12/8 time signatures and how instead of getting mad maybe he should pay attention to the band onstage who happened to be using THAT SAME RHYTHM DURING THAT SAME SONG. i.e. !!! = tsk tsk tsk.
...I start out with bullet points and end with paragraphs. Ok, back to work!
