putting the j in jjosh

Saturday night Maxine and I went out to this new(ish) place in the Village called (le) poisson rouge to check out a performance of Steve Reich’s "Music For 18 Musicians". Reich was one of the founders of the minimalist school of music along with Phillip Glass, and their music sounds pretty similar. Except that I love MF18M much more than I love anything by Glass. Mike H gave me the album ages ago and it pretty much blew my mind. He went to a performance in New York years and years ago, and I remember thinking how cool it would be to see the piece performed live.

And it was. It was really really great. The musicians set up in this weird in-the-round way (you can sort of tell from the pic below) with xylophone players facing each other and pianists set up so sometimes two people can play the same piano, and clarinets, bass clarinets, vocalists, strings, sitting down. The sound system in poisson rouge was fantastic, and sometimes the sounds would be so eveloping…plus, to see how some of the sounds were made was very elucidating. Things that I had thought were electric guitars and feedback were actually clarinets and vocals. Whoa. Quite a performance.

Here’s a piece of the piece:

Steve Reich – Music for 18 Musicians, Section IV

After they finished, we went into the other room and sat at the bar, had a couple of cocktails. The place sort of emptied out, and then began to fill up again. I remembered that I had seen there was another show that evening. We asked the bartender and he told us — some band, and GRANDMASTER FLASH! Then some guy came by and did magic for us! Then the place got crowded and the bartender apologized for ignoring us by buying us a drink on the house! Nice!

The show started and we went into the other room to check out Grandmaster Flash. He had mad skillz, cutting and mixing the records with razor sharp precision, but the music selection was weird and kind of lame. Smells Like Teen Spirit. Seven Nation Army. Song 2 by Blur. Weird. Lots and lots of shout-outs for New York to get their hands up in the air, and lots and lots of cutting the track out so the crowd could sing along. Like I said, good skillz, and it was cool seeing a living legend, but also kind of strange and disappointing.

Then the band (Midnight Juggernauts) came out, the place was packed with kids and they went nuts. Maxine and I couldn’t work out what all the fuss was about. They dressed really well, and had beards and looked cool and kind of sounded like Justice, so I guess that’s what the kids are into these days. I recognized this one track from the Cut Copy FabricLive mix…it’s almost good, the bassline is funky, it was fun to see live. Then we checked out a few more tracks which were all weak and split. Great night. Here’s the track I knew (bassline is unstoppable), see what you think…vid is good…