`Tribal Tech ' dresses up bad Rock as Jazz

`Tribal Tech ' dresses up bad Rock as Jazz

By David Zweifler

JAKARTA (JP): The night of Jazz at Ratu Plaza concert hall Saturday
was one of old favorites, followed by new disappointments.

The Bubby Chen trio was the first act and -- like always --
they were solid, playing some great old Jazz favorites. Bubby
himself was not exactly inspired, but he looked and sounded like
he was having a good time and it rubbed off on the audience.

To be honest, it's hard to go into much detail about the first
part of the evening.

The concert was like going into a fine restaurant, having a
wonderful meal and then finding a dead roach on your desert
plate; you walk out of the restaurant not remembering the food,
but the roach.

The Bubby Chen trio was quite good, and some of the best Jazz
that I've heard in Jakarta so far. The second band, Tribal Tech,
was so awful it was hard to remember anything else about the
evening.

The band opened with sound and fury, with an overwhelmingly
loud synthesizer being hammered on by an overwhelmingly large
Scott Kinsey. When he first came out, he looked upset with his
synthesizer set up. His anxiety continued throughout the evening,
with him cutting off in the middle of solos to play with his tech
board. The only conclusion that I could come to at the end of the
night was that this was a case of a poor workman blaming his
tools; to my mind, he did not put three good notes together even
by accident throughout the entire performance.

The lead guitarist, Scott Henderson, came out whaling away on
his guitar like some rock and roll refugee. The overwhelming
sentiment inspired by his performer was disgust at his arrogance.
He would continually drop a speedy, not very impressive riff and
then stop, stepping away from the mike. It reminded me of a Van
Halen or B.B. King affectation in which the performer with his
actions says, "Okay, now you just dig that last string for
awhile." Of course, the big difference with Halen or King is they
are actually good enough to pull this off. Henderson, alas, is
not.

That's actually not entirely fair. At one point in the
evening, he started playing some Jimi Hendrix wah-wah peddle
guitar that was really quite good. This, he incorporated into a
"Jazz" melody that was being put together on the organ, not
making any attempt to fuse the two styles in any way. The effect,
in this instance, was one of total incongruity. My only guess is
that he started out as a fast rock guitarist who figured that he
could get a few Jazz scales down and wing it.

Not a Jazz

The big problem with both the organist and the lead guitarist
is that they both constantly moved out into intricate, atonal
solos that moved farther and farther away from the string being
developed by the band -- and then never brought then back in.
This is not a Jazz or a style point, but just one of
professionalism; each musician has to be coordinated with the
rest of the group. Another symptom of this was, again and again,
the solos seemed to have no start or finish. Not less than twice
in the evening one performer stepped on someone else's solo, or
was left hanging when they finished and there was no one else
there to pick up the tune.

In the midst of so much ugliness, surprisingly, there was some
beauty as well. The drummer, Hillary Jones, was truly awesome.
Watching her thrash her drum-set, hidden behind Henderson and
Kinsey, she almost managed to salvage the show for me. She so
outclassed her bandmates on stage that it was almost absurd; it
was like watching Louis Armstrong playing in at a high school
trumpet recital. I would literally have paid to see a half hour
of her alone, or her with the bassist, Gary Willis, who knew how
to work a Jazz or rock bass to make a kicking bass/percussion
mix.

However, this does not a band make. Nor a concert.

After the show, I heard some people wondering aloud if Tribal
Tech would be classified as 'classic' Jazz or 'Jazz/Rock.' In
this case, the inaccessibility of the music was not a matter of
understanding the style, but just recognizing that it was bad.