 Photo courtesy of Medeski, Martin and Wood Medeski, Martin and Wood with special guest DJ Logic played for a sold-out crowd at Cornell's Bailey Hall on the night of April 18. |
The stage shimmers, a moonlight purple glow glimmering off the golden cymbals and accentuating the amplifiers' angel hair fur. The upright bass leans on the monolithic speaker, its precarious position hinting at a devastating fall if it is not adjusted soon. Cornell's Bailey Hall is threatening to explode from the tension that has built up; its pressure feels like the walls are at their bursting point. Three men--John Medeski, Billy Martin and Chris Wood--walk onto the stage. One sits at the drums on stage left. Another picks up the bass, leans it against himself, loves it. The third adjusts his piano stool, pulling it up to the baby grand, whose white and black checkerboard keys are facing the audience. The man on drums, Martin, picks up a bottle and starts tapping it arhythmically--randomly, it seems, like rain or marbles dropped on a hardwood floor.
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Medeski looks at him and begins nodding his head. His hands lightly touch the keyboard; fingers roll on the keys in a flow of motion that is unfathomably both speedy and restrained. His hands are mice running away from fire, jumping to escape, but landing back on it and jumping again in a frenzied race to escape the flame.
But the flame envelops them, and the dynamics change.
Now it is a groove, a slow waltz, free. The dancers in the audience do not know how to move to this style and they try in vain to pick a rhythm. They are doing the humpty dance in a Coltrane atmosphere, a void of beat that Wood's bass thumps out. Kaboom. Pling bloop. Ne-ba-pa-dee-dee. Pling. Thwacachunk a-pa-chunk plunk.
Medeski's back faces the audience, but by observing his arms, the look on his Kevin Spacey face is obvious. He is concentrating, lurching, stopping. His hands fly. He glances at Wood, and intuitively they find the same note.
Martin makes his drumming sound so effortless it is easy to forget his beat is too complicated to follow. He is bouncing around, bobbing, weaving and dropping big-beat bombs that make Bailey Hall shudder, threatening to collapse.
They stand. The audience cheers. They leave the stage and another man comes on and stands behind the two record players that have been lonely sitting on the back of the stage next to the drums. He puts a record on and immediately grabs another one. He is teaching us a history lesson. This is the Chemical Brothers. This is the Beatles. This is Miles Davis. This is the Beastie Boys. This is Ella Fitzgerald. This is music.
He is DJ Logic. Now the audience hears why.
Hip-Hop jumps out of the speakers surrounding the stage when Medeski, Martin and Wood return to their respective locations. Medeski now has more keyboards to play with. A Moog. A clavinet. Wood's upright sits alone while he straps on his McCartney electric. Logic doesn't leave. This is no longer logical.
The instruments start singing along to the stutter of the records. Logic looks up, smiles, looks back down at the rotating circles of music, his hands stopping mid-motion to allow Wood to pick up a rubber-banded cylinder.
Instead of beats now, Logic is making the disks chirp -birds sing. Medeski's clav squawks in response. Hey, pass it this way--yeah, that's it. This is the groove.
Medeski's hands smack the keyboard like a kid playing an arcade whack-a-mole. It looks random, but it's obvious that he knows every note he is going to hit before he hits it. He has one hand on one keyboard, spanking it. His other hand is hidden, but it's easy to hear what it's doing. Medeski's hand is feeling the funk.
The band starts "Bubblehouse," a song everyone in the crowd has heard, listened to, disseminated. They have never heard it like this, though. It's funk threatened by breakbeats and hip-hop rhythms. It becomes half-time, then techno, then an amalgam of swing and ambient, then triple-time, then stops. The band rises, bows and walks off the stage. And the stage shimmers ...
The sold-out crowd was stunned by the mixture of musical styles that mirrored its own melting-pot look. There was no encore that night--there was no way for the band to musically top what had already transpired.
There was also no disappointment. The crowd moved outside, surprised by the drizzle that spilled from the sky as it exited the hall. Some of them smiled. Others talked. All of them were impressed.