hello again :) this time i was aiming for 6:30pm. i really wanted to get good seats for my "guessts" (my wife as well as two friends i thought would enjoy the show). stopped at my brother's apt to get my ticket (since they were treating me this time -- i got them tix for the standards trio tomorrow (uh, tonight) at carnegie hall -- ok, cmon, who else here is going to be there??!) met some friend of theirs who i'm guessing was a guitarist (based on the obsessive guitar discussions he and rob were having). alice had made some food which smelled REALLY REALLY REALLY great and i would have loved to eat with them but i was hellbent on getting to tonic early and getting in line. i was expecting to get rained on too because of "the hurricane". (people keep talking about it, i dont really know what's going on. but it was quite windy and cloudy and seemed to be *threatening* rain on my walk downtown...) got a good spot in line, enjoyed observation and some conversation with fellow zornfest attendees, my people had shown up and joined me in line by the time we went inside, where we navigated the airtight security of the tonic "checkpoint". ticket, my credit card, id... decent seats. eventually the place fills up, rob and alice and their friend show up, happily camped at a table further back, alice has brought me a container of the food which i didnt get to have, i am psyched!! but i save it for later ("no outside food or drink" for one reason, and besides i dont want to be eating when the show starts, and it is approaching That Time). in the beginning of the set (i only saw the first set) i was having some reservations. i thought they started out a little rough. not quite settled or something. i was thinking this was the first set of this band, and maybe they would get better over time and i should have come, and brought people, for later appearances. the turning point was a few tunes into the set, they played a really crazy tune, it had fast jump cuts, abrupt shifts, weird sounds, it was exciting and funny, and after that things really picked up. (later i talked to my brother and he mentioned this tune too.) there was some great playing by baron and greg cohen. greg cohen... ok, it's memory lane time. in 1993, i wrote this: | For the second half of the set they [Zorn, Baron, Douglas, Cohen] | played Masada tunes. Looked to me like Baron was reading them for | the first time. I don't know about the other players. Greg Cohen | couldn't quite keep up with the furious tempo Baron set on one tune | where the bass is walking really fast -- when I saw Masada with Mark | Dresser (and not Baron) it was a different story... In fact, I | didn't think this was a particularly great execution of the Masada | tunes. Perhaps it was because they weren't familiar enough with the | music to forget about playing it right and actually *do something* | with it. Most of the tunes just didn't seem to evolve or go | anywhere, even if at any given point in time they were playing | well. Give Baron a chance to familiarize himself with the charts | (even so he kicked ass!) and get Dresser back on bass, and *then* | I'd be pretty excited... The combination of Douglas (who didn't seem | to be having any trouble) and Zorn worked well I thought. I TAKE IT BACK ABOUT GREG COHEN!!! I'M SORRY!!! YOU ROCK DUDE!!! maybe i wasnt completely wrong about that "first live" masada show. but it's a different story now! obviously, they have a lot of experience with the tunes and the band. i dont know if greg cohen was already a great bass player ten years ago, but he played great tonight. he does an admirable job holding down basslines, in the midst of considerable fury and potential confusion. tonight i was impressed by his improvising. he was featured a number of times, in intense duos with baron, solos, playing fast, slow, inside, outside. he has no trouble keeping up with baron now -- and joey has not slowed down at all AFAICT :) the combination of douglas and zorn still works well of course... my one complaint was that both horns were up too high in the mix. it would have been much better i think if they had not been so loud, and didnt drown out baron and cohen. the whole band sound would have been better and nothing would have been lost. (eh, maybe it sounded better from other perspectives or something, from the back maybe, i dont know.) dave douglas looked like a middle-aged ninja doctor (he was wearing a black outfit and the shirt was reminiscent of "scrubs" kinda shirt like on ER or something...). BTW that's a good thing ;) more towards the latter part of the set, there were some slow tunes, including one where greg cohen was featured again, very nice... there was an uptempo tune, in seven, where baron kept a popping beat going, and growing, and -- again, IIRC, with cohen holding down that bassline! wow. rocking. i'm a sucker for that kind of thing -- insanely groovy ivo papasov-like jazz-influenced bulgarian wedding music in weird meters while sounding like james brown band... wife-friendliness quotient: HIGH. she had said something about liking music where she could dance, or at least imagine dancing. i know, i know, i know, everyone here likes to dance to microphone feedback, amplified cacti etc. but XU FENG didnt really cut it for her and i can understand that. masada, OTOH, was danceable. easily. she said she'd like to hear them sometime in a setting where there was dancing. i agreed that would be nice, suggested an outdoor setting, and said i'd dance with her in that case. 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