the most memorable live shows you've attended

[negative potential]

still the Brotzmann Tentet @ Tonic for 2 40-45 minute sets in 2001, I think

with charts and tunes and all in the band were on fire - especially Peter, Mats and Hamid - the groove based pieces were immense with energy and intensity

Stevie Rey, I caught a train in 2002 (or early 2003?) all the way to Bielefeld (way the fuck out in West Germany) to catch the Brötzmann Tentet since they weren't stopping in Berlin on that tour. It was really nice, a sort of compact underground club (Bunker Ulmenwall). A really devoted, respectful audience. I bought a ton of CDs. As train travel is not 24/7 in Germany, I ended up sleeping in the Bielefeld train station that night and then caught the earliest ICE train back to Berlin at like 4 am.

I'm glad I caught that set, probably my last chance to see the original lineup with Hamid on drums.

I haven't bothered to see the new line up (or hear it on CD), even though they were in Berlin a couple of years ago (though I did catch an awesome Brötzmann/Gustafsson/Vandermark trio at the Berlin Philharmonic the recording of which is on the CD "Only the Devil Has no Dreams." The cavernous sound of the Philharmonic chamber music hall was well suited to that sort of all-reeds sound). No disrespect to the current line-up of the tentet, I just want my memories to stay poignant.

[Steve Reynolds]

also have not listened or seen the current Tentet - maybe for the same reason or that they do not play charts which was the biggest reason they were really special - they combined older and newer school jazz based improvisation with some imaginative writing and ensemble work - when it worked it was pretty damn great.


will be hearing the man in 3 different bands on June 8th - one with Drake, Kessler, KV & Mars Williams which should really burn, I think

only wish Mats would also be there as well...

[jon abbey]

I aw a few Tentet shows back when they were starting, I preferred the Die Like a Dog quartet with Kondo and Drake. more Kondo and Drake + no Vandermark = win.

[J.F.]

I saw Melt-Banana four times on the German leg of their European tour in 2010. Talking about sleeping in train-stations... On three of those occasions, I returned home at 6 o'clock in the morning (after train rides usually starting at ~2 o'clock in the morning). I travelled ~1400 kilometers for all of that, spend a lot of money - and it was all worth it! I'm not a big fan of most of the more recent material (post-"13 Hedgehogs"-compilation, 2005), but seeing them was absolutely fantastic nevertheless. That for sure were two memorable weeks for me!

[bedouin]

Super bombastic performance of The Wall (Pink Floyd) in London, Earl's Court '80. I can't stand that album now.
John Zorn Naked City in Birmingham/UK '89
Akiyama in Seattle '08. This was actually pretty boring, but I was very impressed by his almost saint like image.

[dave quam]

DJ Rashad @ MOMA PS1 end of Aug 2010

Me, Rashad, two footworkers and my friend drove all the way from Chicago non-stop, just making it in time for the show. We didn't really know what to expect, and definitely didn't know it was going to be at a huge outdoor patio with about 4000 spectators. The DJs before us were playing to a decent sized audience early on, but nobody was dancing. Just before Rashad went on, the DJ started playing footwork tracks, which really cleared things out. When it was his turn to go on, he had to slow the tempo down about 30 bpms, and instead of playing what the bookers expected him to play, he started off with a bunch of house classics. Lil Louis - French Kiss, Cajmere - The Perculator, all played when they should have been played: to warm people up. People who had no idea who this guy was started dancing, a crowd of about 1000 people on the patio. He transitioned into old Dance Mania stuff, upping the tempo by about 20 bpms. By this time even more people were going nuts, and all of the sudden he dropped his juke remix of Machine's There But for the Grace of God Go I and then started playing his weird footwork tracks. The two footworkers we were with cleared out a circle in the middle of all of the spectators and started battling, and people were going nuts. By the end of the night there had to have been about 4000 people there, and it was amazing to see all these weird white tourists enjoying these bent tracks usually reserved for a handful of dancers in a small basement on the South Side of Chicago.

[Dan Warburton]

The mention of Naked City above reminds me of the infamous "Houdini / de Sade" show in Saint Ouen in April 1992, after which John Zorn chose not to return to (or was actively discouraged from returning to) France for about 5 or 6 years. The warmup set was by Painkiller, and Zorn blew himself to bits, which might explain why he didn't play in the Naked City + Arto Lindsay + Eye + Winant + Patton(?) etc etc big band in the second half of the show. He did, as I recall, conduct parts of it with a huge dildo. This was standard shriek NC fare until about a quarter of an hour in, when Lindsay stepped demurely up to the mic and said "we'd now like to present some of the life and work of the Marquis de Sade" or words to that effect. At that point, the two video monitors, one at either side of the stage, twinkled into life.. On the left there was a reasonably inoffensive soft porn flick of two ladies half-heartedly whipping each other with feather boas or something, but what we saw on the screen on the right made Mapplethorpe's Perfect Moment seem like The Muppet Show in comparison. Suffice it to say I heard a lady sitting in front in me mutter "I'll never eat chocolate again" as she headed gagging for the exit. (I was a bit embarrassed by it all too, as I'd taken advantage of the opportunity to invite a girl I was rather keen on - maybe it's safe to take your beloved to a Zorn gig these days, but it wasn't then - and offered her dinner chez moi as a consolation prize.. "OK, as long as there's nothing brown on the menu," she replied quaveringly..)
The music accompanying this mighty shitstorm (literally) was basically Leng Tch'e, and it went on for an amazingly long time. Certainly more than half an hour. Apparently Zorn actually wanted the punters to walk out in disgust, but many stayed the course.

[negative potential]

Hooray for the vast depths of the Internet. Here's guitarist Jeff Gburek's take on the same Tilbury performance I wrote about above. Bonus for his account of playing a lo-fi recording of the performance a few days later. His take on the interminable Django Bates performance that came before is in line with mine.

From the comments section of http://www.bagatellen.com/archives/reviews/001254.html :

I heard Tilbury’s recital of the last Feldman piano piece, live, here in Kreuzberg. I clicked on the microcassette. Lovely, placid. Especially of course the slight smile on the lips of the elder gentleman performer’s face. Abt twenty minutes later, after a thrice repeated phrase where you expect in Feldman always at least another hour out from this…the sound fades to silence. Then applause. Click off microcassette. RH on my right-hand asks, how long was that? Short. I started to imagine the smile was the knowing smile of an impending death, the end of the piece, the death of the music and the composer, the release. The satisfaction of the fragmentary, the undoing of intention by the final dissolution over which no one has any power reflected in the admiration of passing water under the bridge. One day later, at the same hour, I am playing the microcassette for AN at Kule. It is a nice moment in which I feel happy knowing that someone else is made happy by something that makes me happy: this hissy little speaker with the delicate piano clusters plinking out (ir)regularly, placidly, in a lovely way, still creates a mood between us we share. As I describe the curious smile Tilbury had on his face, AN points out: it could have been because he was playing such a bad piano. I countered that maybe the last piano piece’s great innovation was that it was unpredictably short. Feldman was a genius.
[...]
(i had to sit through django bates before tilbury--enough to make you schizophrenic: in the first case i am hoping for an earthquake to stop these skills from torturing me with this endlessly liquid banality and then when tilbury plays i am in love with skills again...such is life)

[piege]

I was really impressed by Gordon Monahan's live presentation of "New and Used Furniture Music" He used a theremin to control water droplets falling on CDs, records, plates, saw blades, and also the tension of piano wires which were strung across the room and played with electromagnets. The system also control thundersheets and this weird subsonic feedback.

It was novel but also musically very satisfying.