Friday, July 21, 2006

San Francisco July 20

The show at the Concourse in San Francisco was historic, if for no other reason than it was the largest US audience to date for a show headlined by Thievery Corporation. The shows in Seattle and Portland had audeinces in the 1500 range. The converted train station that is now the Concourse can hold nearly three times that many people and the band played to over 4000 Thievery heads whose exhuberance was equaled only by the growing purple haze that increasingly filled the hall. For the first time on the tour, there was a warm-up act, Dhamaal, an electronic collective. Strongly influenced by Pakistani folk music, vocalist Riffat Sultana sang with great passion and feeling and the band propelled the music forward with complex rhythmic beats. They were a fantastic precursor the main event and very generous, lovely people. Maneesh the Twister offered Thievery members Dhamaal CDs and T-shirts (very much appreciated by Thievery, which was happy to reciprocate.)

Well, you know how I felt about Portland. The massive Concourse could not hope to enable the sort of intimacy engendered at Roseland. But the San Francisco show was another fantastic performance. For this show, rather than alternately shooting photos and video from backstage and the front-row, I decided to join my friend, Mark Zoidis, and some of his pals around the sound-booth. I wanted to be in the center of the crowd and experience the show and its energy from within: hot, sweaty, bumping, and grinding. The rising and falling tide crafted by Mssrs. Garza and Hilton and the rest of the Corporation took us on a wonderful journey through the many flavors and intensities of Thievery Corporation, with the energy-levels exploring an extraordinary dynamic range. Sometimes the whole audience was dancing frenetically; other times, we were more still but equally enraptured by the music.

The group of people I experienced this with personifies the best of the Bay Area: thirty- and forty-something professionals who use their expertise not to make oodles of money, but to make the world a better place. Mark is a former money manager and consultant specializing in socially conscious investments. His friends Cindy Cohen and Fred von Lohmann are attorneys at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF, founded by Grateful Dead lyricist and Harvard Law professor John Perry Barlow), and Ian McCarthy is VP of Marketing for Orb Networks, a company that provides free software enables users to stream media from their PCs. EFF had a lot to celebrate, as they convinced a Federal judge not to dismiss EFF's case against ATT for sharing private client information with the government. See http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2006_07.php#004832

This is but one segment of the extended Thievery family. I’ve been struck by the tremendous diversity of fans. Although Thievery does not seem to have reached as substantial a black or latino audience as its music surely could appeal to, concert-goers do encompass a broad range of ages and musical tastes, from jam-band followers to Reggae lovers and jazz freaks, with substantial numbers of people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, with quite a few greying, ultra-hip, old-school cats.

The energy was very different than at Seattle and Portland. The sound-system at the Concourse was far bigger and more powerful and the board more sophisticated. Rob and Eric took advantage of this, especially on the more uptempo reggae-influenced dub tunes, by dropping bombs of exploding bass that literally shook my chest cavity and its contents. I love that! The sounds was big an rich and well-mixed. A lot of people I’ve talked to about the band have been blown away by the concerts. The CD’s may be on their heavy rotation list, but they don’t know what to expect from the live show, especially since Thievery began primarily as two mix-master DJs but also because many songs are recorded by renowned artists, including David Byrne and Perry Farrell, who one would not expect to see on tour with the band. But the current band on tour has fourteen members, nearly all of whom have performed with them on their last tour, and together they create a sound that is REALLY BIG!

Rob Garza – DJ/mixing/keyboards/guitar
Eric Hilton – DJ/mixing
Ashish Vyas (Hash) – bass
John Nelson (L-John) – percussion
Frank Orral – percussion/vocals
Rob Myers – sitar, electric guitar
Dave Finnell – trumpet
Frank Mitchell – tenor sax
Loulou Ghelichkhani – vocals
Alana Davis – vocals
Karina Zeviani – vocals
Sleepy Wonder – vocals
Root – vocals
Z - vocals

That really big sound, combined with the really big audience, filling a really big space with a really phat sound system resulted in a killer show that we’ll all remember.

2 Comments:

Blogger Crouching Hamster said...

No NYC show? Ack!
(I'll play the album very loudly at a party!)

7/26/2006 12:07 PM  
Blogger Edward Shanken said...

New York, Webster Hall Sept 24-25!!!

8/22/2006 4:53 PM  

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