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Naruyoshi Kikuchi
9:50pm at Orange Court on Sunday night can be a lonely place to be, but a band like this sextet is tailor-made for this world. It’s avant-jazz of the type that drives many people to madness, and others to slack-jawed awe.
They are actually a pretty straightforward acoustic jazz quintent at bottom, with piano, upright bass, drums, trumpet, and sax (bandleader Kikuchi). The sex- arrives with the “Dub” part of their name, a fellow named Kimura Purdum behind a massive 25-inch monitor and who-knows-what toys connected to it. He produced squeals with sudden staccato stops, with bits repeated, backtracked and twisted about, presumably all in the service of upping how jarring a standard acoustic ensemble can be.
And they were most definitely doing it right, because it wasn’t polite. The dynamic range was huge, and the horn players were busting lips. The number I walked in was the definition of slinky, with periodic walking bassline breaks that had me looking for the raccoon-masked 1960’s diamond thief in our midst. The rhythms mostly swung like the early 60’s, but altogether the proceedings had the darkness of late-60’s fusion.
It was tasty stuff, and of course Orange Court isn’t the place for it. After a stage reaches a certain size you lose the detail, and these guys weren’t playing those ghost notes for themselves. Or maybe they were, but the point is rhetorical. You probably actually could get the right sound at Orange Court with a little effort though; it’s not that big of a stage. Turn the volume down to about half of what it was, for starters. The crowd was small enough that the people who wanted to would listen, and would be all the more appreciative.
Maybe this is the next innovation in festival technology; if you’re going to invite a shit-hot jazz band, you’ve got to know that sound design isn’t one size fits all.
-Kern
photos by naota. more here
