The recent and upcoming gigs thread

[PurpleMoustache]

Wow, thanks for your fantastic report on Phish at the Sphere. It clearly was almost in another universe gig wise. I sampled the YouTube videos and will spare some time to enjoy them properly soon. Just amazing. Now for the shocker....I have been following your posts building up to your visit to Las Vegas but...until then I had never heard of Phish - only the ex-front man of Marillion (different spelling!) but the short parts of the songs I heard with the videos definitely caught my interest. Absolutely amazing, what an experience - thanks again.

My next post will cover the gig that I went to last night - somewhat less extravagant - but also very enjoyable.

And I want to apologise for adding any posts after yours as I think it needs to stay visible for a while so that many more of our QQ friends can enjoy it. Perhaps it could do with being a sticky post (I think that's the right description) by which I mean easy to find again.

Thank you for your kind words!

The funny thing is in a CBS interview, frontman Trey Anastasio was asked what it felt like to be playing sphere when most people would be asking “who?”, and he said it’s their biggest blessing. “You don’t have to one up your success when you never had any in the first place”.

If you’re getting started I recommend:
A Live One (their first live album, cobbled together from jams from 94-95)
7/22/97
7/10/99
6/14/00 (my favorite, the second set is effectively one hour long hazy ambient jam)
2/26/03
And my first show in person: 7/28/23

All but the last one should be available on Apple Music/Spotify/et al. Much like the Grateful Dead, they have studio albums… don’t listen to the studio albums (at least not to start). Their real magic comes from their live performances.

In gig news, this Wednesday I’m seeing Slowdive. Will be interesting to see if the Sphere really did ruin me for other shows going forward.

 

[omega4]

Average White Band

I saw AWB last night at the Cambridge Corn Exchange on their final UK tour and they were great. I have seen them three time before over the last 50 years and this may have been the best performance of all of those. Two hours and ten minutes of their best songs - wonderful! Alan Gorrie and Onnie McIntyre were in great form and the whole band gave their all. The sax players in particular added a layer of quality that absolutely captured the essence of AWB. If they come anywhere near you on tour before they put their instruments back in the case one last time I can recommend one final blast of "Music, sweet music"

 

[omega4]

Thank you for your kind words!

The funny thing is in a CBS interview, frontman Trey Anastasio was asked what it felt like to be playing sphere when most people would be asking “who?”, and he said it’s their biggest blessing. “You don’t have to one up your success when you never had any in the first place”.

If you’re getting started I recommend:
A Live One (their first live album, cobbled together from jams from 94-95)
7/22/97
7/10/99
6/14/00 (my favorite, the second set is effectively one hour long hazy ambient jam)
2/26/03
And my first show in person: 7/28/23

All but the last one should be available on Apple Music/Spotify/et al. Much like the Grateful Dead, they have studio albums… don’t listen to the studio albums (at least not to start). Their real magic comes from their live performances.

In gig news, this Wednesday I’m seeing Slowdive. Will be interesting to see if the Sphere really did ruin me for other shows going forward.

Great tips thank you. Live music is great and small gigs can be just as rewarding as the big, if not enormous, ones. I saw Connor Selby recently at my local jazz and blues club - 90 seats - and it was brilliant. I had not heard of him until two weeks before that when I found his name amongst all of the star guitarists on the charity release of Mark Knopfler's Going Home - mentioned elsewhere on QQ for the impossibly to by Atmos blu-ray. He is a star of the future if he has the right label (he just signed to the same label as Joe Bonamassa) and management. Enjoy Slowdive - sorry another new one for me but then again I had seen Porcupine Tree a few times before they became well known. It's great to go down the discovery path now and again!

 

[madship]

The Decemberists, Tour opening night in Kingston, NY.

Found this from the show.

 

[privateuniverse]

The Decemberists, Tour opening night in Kingston, NY.


View attachment 105008View attachment 105009

Food this from the show.

How were they? I am seeing them in New Haven on Saturday.

 

[madship]

How were they? I am seeing them in New Haven on Saturday.

They were great. They were having a lot of fun and had great rapport with the crowd. A truly bold choice of encore. A 20 minute live debut.

 

[privateuniverse]

They were great. They were having a lot of fun and had great rapport with the crowd. A truly bold choice of encore. A 20 minute live debut.

Cool. Looking forward to it. I'll resist the urge to look up the setlist and wait to be surprised. I've got seats in the front row of the loge which is my favorite spot in most theaters.

 

[PurpleMoustache]

Just got back from seeing Slowdive at the Levitt Pavilion. Had a lot of fun, but it was both too cold and rainy for an outdoor show.

 

[humprof]

I'd been eagerly anticipating another installment in the series, the jazz-funk-hip-hop unit Butcher Brown, this weekend. Only...I'm not inviting a "political" discussion here, but...after a very low-key anti-war protest (and occupation of the building that houses the perpetually absent president's office) broke out earlier this week, the brain trust of mediocrities who administer the campus decided that an appropriate response would be a) to call in a helicopter and some belligerent cops to provoke a confrontation and rough some people up, and, when that didn't achieve the desired results, b) to close campus for a couple of days--and then to extend that closure through the weekend (so far).

So now, not only has an annual campus HIp-Hop Conference--scheduled guest speaker: Chuck D; theme: Power to the People!--been cancelled (guess who failed to register the irony?), so has Butcher Brown.

Well, the draconian overreaction of my nitwit bad-dad college president may have rained on my Butcher Brown parade (the very least of the baleful repercussions of his authoritarian paranoia), but it freed up my Saturday night to catch world-class pan master Andy Narell performing with my university's venerable steelband, whose spring concert got an emergency relocation to a local elementary school gym. It was a truly beautiful night. Narell is a mensch, and both he and the band, led heroically for 30 years by a good colleague of mine, were in top form. (There's been some talk about Telarc/Heads-Up SACDs recently; if you don't own a copy of Narell's The Passage, then you need to go drop 7 bucks at Discogs immediately!)

 

[privateuniverse]

They were great. They were having a lot of fun and had great rapport with the crowd. A truly bold choice of encore. A 20 minute live debut.

....and Decembersists made their way to New Haven tonight. They were great. A rockier show than I've seen from them in the past.

 

[svengaleekie]

Last night I went to see Cyan at The Pop Factory (apparently it used to be a fizzy drink manufacturing plant) in Porth South Wales U.K. First up Pete Jones played some Genesis and Tigermoth Tales songs, then after a short break the rest of the band, Luke Machin, Dan Nelson, Jiffy Griffiths, & Rob Reed, joined him and they played songs from Cyan's albums For King And Country & Pictures From The Other Side. As you may expect the musicianship was superb and greatly appreciated by the smallish audience.

 

[Marplot]

Just got my tix to see Howard Jones / ABC / Haircut 100 in August. Should be a ton of fun, or is that tonne?

 

[quadrifonico]

Recently listened to a couple of operas at la Scala and lemme tell you that's real Atmos and with zero overhead speakers