`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.