live + direct

several years ago i went on tour with kurtis mantronik. it was a short tour – two dj gigs over a week, one in osaka and the other in tokyo. he was opening for underworld.

kurtis, his then girl alison, daphne and i arrived in osaka one early april evening, a few days before the start of the cherry blossom festival. feeling a bit famished after the long flight, we headed out to the strip for some dinner after checking into our hotel. i read kanji (i.e. hanzi) so was able to steer us in the general direction of a few reasonable looking joints. after deciding on a place with the best-looking plastic food in the window, we did the sensible thing and picked a lobster and a flounder dinner to share by the lovely pictures in the thin menu.

splayed out on a bed of crushed ice, the flounder had been expertly filleted with the whole exposed side served as fresh sashimi. the lobster had an even better presentation: its tail was transformed into a sumptuous sashimi spread that covered the stern of a wooden serving boat while its upper-half, sans claws, stood upright at the bow like a surreal crustacean figurehead.

alison went for the flounder and immediately jumped back; the fish gasped. it’s still alive and doubling as its own serving tray. the tail-less lobster also started to move, slowly waving his antennae like a drunken orchestra conductor. our hostess, a friendly middle-age woman with hair dyed a creepy dark green, laughed at us.

the gig the next night went ok. kurtis did his thing and we spent part of the night chilling backstage with an american exchange student/groupie who was rolling her ovaries off on e and repeatedly told me how bored she was in japan. she squealed and ran for the door when underworld took the stage. i hung out with kurtis and the girls the rest of the night on the balcony, looking down at the mass of humanity that surged and ebbed with layers of grooves and flashing disco lights.

in retrospect, part of the reason i steered us to that osaka restaurant the first night was because of a big black kanji character painted on a red banner outside its door that literally means “to live” in chinese. chinese joints use this character often in combination with other words like “bouncing” or “jumping” to help tout the freshness of their seafood. since sashimi is not part of chinese cooking, these phrases are only meant to hype the listless suckers drifting in the restaurant tank before they show up on your table even less lively as dinner. in a moment of cultural hubris, i had assumed the way japanese use the kanji for “to live” is the same as the way i use them.

my first exposure to a “live” show came via don kirschner’s rock concert on tv in the late 70s, not long after my family moved to america. i don’t remember much of it, not even who played, since it was so long ago, but i do remember begging my parents to let me stay up late to watch and being confused by the way it was billed as a “live” show. i don’t mean “live” as in i was watching as it happened - i had enough of a clue to know that wasn’t the case - but that i didn’t understand how a show could live, or die.

in many ways, live performances these days are sorry affairs. few mainstream acts seem interested in distinguishing their live set musically. for the fans, the concert-going experience is often reduced to a merchandising exercise and sloppy rehash of records they already own. while covers or “unplugged” version of hits favored by some acts help, they can easily feel gimmicky or marketing-driven. the kind of revelations that compel reconsideration of an artist, like say, a 30 minutes sonny rollins improvised sax solo or a mf doom freestyle, are few and far between.

to compensate, more and more shows are aiming for visual extravaganza rather than musical enhancement or exploration. while this seems like a no-brainer for appealing to a generation raised on a diet of music videos, it only further perpetuates the acceptance of performances that while live are far from alive.

“jumbo” is taken from underworld’s "everything everything (live)" compilation (v2, 2000). as its name suggests, the “rascal skoolin’ edit” is an unreleased edit of some of mantronix’s best beats and pieces that kurtis sometimes used for his live set. it was stitched together by former latin rascals albert cabrera.

Posted by cellpharmer at January 17, 2005 04:46 PM