Jungle Brothers |
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Thu. September 16.1999 4:02 PM EDT |
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New York Clubs Overrun By Femi Kuti And A Guitar-Rock ArmyHandsome Boy Modeling School, Guided by Voices, Sparklehorse, Wheat also play CMJ's opening night. by Senior Writer Gil Kaufman and Staff Writer Christopher O'Connor |
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Femi Kuti (left) mixed funk and jazz, while Beulah played Beatles-esque guitar-rock. (Peter Ellenby) |
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NEW YORK — Guitars and turntables filled Manhattan as the
CMJ Music Marathon got under way Wednesday night, but it took a
saxophone-playing bandleader from Nigeria to really get the four-day
party going. At the festival's
Femi Kuti, the energetic, muscular sax-playing son of the late Nigerian bandleader Fela Kuti, stole the show with his 12-piece band, winning a two-minute-long ovation after he was done. The set was filled with choreographed dance moves and music that seemed to trace an evolution of American funk and jazz from James Brown to Kool and the Gang and even to Kenny G. Kuti played light, breezy saxophone solos over tight, relentless funk beats. "Femi Kuti's bringing a new beat, and that beat is one of the best there is out there," CMJ attendee Benjamin Kelly, from Brooklyn, N.Y., said. Kelly, 28, produces an Internet world-music radio show called "Reaction Sound System." At the Wetlands Preserve in Tribeca, the night was more about flash than skill. There, Prince Paul and Dan "The Automator" Nakamura, creators of the trip-hoppy Handsome Boy Modeling School album So ... How's Your Girl? (1999), tested the audience for what Prince Paul called its "inner handsomeness." Wearing suits, the two DJs, who took the roles of their album alter egos Chest Rockwell (Prince Paul) and Nathaniel Merriweather (Nakamura), led audience members through interactive skits designed to show them how to have sex without actually asking for it. Example: Compliment your target on how her pink bandana matches her bag. While it was much more of a listening party than a show, the Handsome Boy Modeling School did feature live moments. Singer Roison Murphy of the group Moloko and rapper J-Live shared the microphone for "The Truth," a spooky lounge number in the tradition of Portishead. Later, J-Live, El-P of the rap group Company Flow and San Francisco rapper Big Merc took the stage for 10 minutes of freestyling about their abilities, how the others weren't so hot, about the audience and anything else that came to mind. All from folks that Prince Paul and Nakamura both introduced as "Handsome Boy graduates." "I call it true school," J-Live (born Justice Law), 23, said of the performance and of his album The Best Part, due in January. "I came here for the fun and the business." Nearby at the Knitting Factory, the only electronic beat in evidence was from a lazy-sounding drum machine that gothic pop band Sparklehorse used. The Virginia band topped a bill at the avant-garde jazz/rock club that also included a DJ set from Belle and Sebastian member Richard Colburn and horn-accented, Beatles-esque guitar rock from San Francisco's Beulah. Boston band Wheat took the stage before Sparklehorse's night-closing set with nearly an hour of swirling, guitar-driven songs that featured intricate interplay between singer/guitarists Steve Levesque and Ricky Brennan. They previewed their second album, Hope and Adams (Oct. 12), with a number of songs that stretched out into fluid, chiming guitar jams accented by Levesque's high, fragile vocals. Sparklehorse's hour-long set of dark, distorted rock matched the humid, drizzly sound of the streets outside the club. Leader Mark Linkous conjured a bleak mood to match that of a city under a hurricane watch as Floyd churned its way north. Linkous and his four-piece band used everything from staticky short-wave radio sounds to violins, upright bass, drum machine, xylophones and fuzzed-out guitars to drive home the creeping ballads "Waiting for Nothing," "All Night Home" and the Pixies-like distorto-punk of "Tears on Fresh Fruit" and the cathartic set-ender "Pig" (RealAudio excerpt). At Roseland, a cavernous midtown club, pop-rockers old and new — Cheap Trick and Guided by Voices — played a double bill of guitar-fueled hookery. GBV have made a bid for commercial success with the Ric Ocasek–produced Do the Collapse, but they filled their set with a host of unfamiliar tunes and left out the album's single, "Teenage FBI," according to David Cavalier, a guitarist for the New York band Moneyshot, who was in the audience. Still, they sounded "like the best club band in the world," Cavalier said. GBV frontman Robert Pollard then joined Cheap Trick, whose biggest hits came in the '70s and '80s, to sing "Surrender" (RealAudio excerpt). At Acme Underground in Greenwich Village, Bikeride, from California, and Poole, a Maryland quartet led by ex-Lilys drummer Harry Evans, bashed out buzzy, harmony-laden guitar pop along the same lines to an audience of no more than 40 people. With Moog synthesizer lines, falsetto choruses, twin rhythm guitars and the occasional trumpet blast, Bikeride songs such as "Erik & Angie" and "Blue Jeans" were nearly bubblegum. Poole were literally fronted by their drummer: Evans set up his drum kit at the edge of the stage, in the spotlight, and sang infectious pop-rock buttressed by raggedy guitars and clean harmonies. (Associate Editor Matty Karas contributed to this report.) |
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