Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Surprise! Surprise?

After watching five concerts in Brussels by big acts.. I suspected as much !!

I think the only really genuine act I saw was Chick Corea .. even though I didn't really understand his often stormy, mostly 'all over the place', 'abstract art' equivalent of music all that well...

Coming in second, I suppose, was Dave Matthews (whom I am going to see again in a couple of weeks (yipee! ) ) But then, I always imagined that he would be a little less contrived... Even if the encore was rehearsed , it was certainly true that the audience pulsed to hear more.. He certainly managed to make the concert personal and intimate. Ofcourse it was a small auditorium and a solo concert.

The absolute pits, you'd be surprised to hear perhaps, was Bob dylan! He played his set so monotonously. Every song sounded like the previous one. It was so tight it seemed like the set was programmed for ten seconds between each song to allow for applause. And finally, the encore was so contrived, I almost groaned aloud. (And I usually get quite into the mood so to speak, at a concert, so if i'm groaning it's because i'm awfully disappointed) Frankly, it seemed to me that he was sick of his own songs after forty years of it and was fucking with everyone by playing them in what seemed like a completely absurd arrangement! I really think I wasted my time going to that concert.. But that's another story!

2 comments:

Ashwin Raghu said...

A reasonably reliable rule of thumb is to look out to see whether the band actually takes a half-minute to hurriedly look at each other and exchange a few words ("What song do we play now, they want an encore?!"). If they aren't doing that and are launching right into it", every instrument launching nonchalantly into the first bar, you know its bloody pre-meditated :)

Ashwin Raghu said...

A couple of more thoughts: when you go to watch a single musician (whether he's actually solo on stage or is accompanied by a backing band) rather than a group, there's always more of a chance that you'll see a lot more of the banter and the communicating happening. A lot of the banter happens because the artist wants to feel comfortable with the stage and the evening. When you're solo, you HAVE to turn to the crowd, you're all alone up there... when you're only one of four or five sharing the stage and the spotlight, you "get" from your bandmates a lot of what that solo artist seeks from the crowd.

I'm sure there are exceptions - Dave Matthews might well be one of them.. I've watched (and listened to) concerts of him both solo and with DMB and, drunk or stoned or whatever state he's in, he just cant stop bantering :)

Oh but Dylan, at least on that evening, didn't look like he gave a flying fuck about any of it! :)