RBMA: Round Robin
Plaza St-Hubert, Montreal
October 18 2016
The Red Bull Music Academy organised a special night of "Round Robin" improvised music.
The concept was pretty interesting and consisted of many musicians coming together 2 at a time and improvising together for 5 minutes then 1 left and another entered to continue for 5 more minutes.
Each musician played 10 minutes overall in different styles to create some new, hopefully good and exciting for them and the crowd watching them.
The order of musicians was chosen at random with some minor tweaks and for the most part the result was really interesting.
It didn't start really great and it must have been hard to start the show when Braid's drummer, Austin Tufts, played alone for 5 minutes until someone else joined in, but even then the combination was odd, they were far away and the 2nd musician never even looked at the poor drummer. I'm not sure that starting with a drummer like him was the problem or that it would have been hard for anybody to start, but I was hopeful that the remainder of the night would get better.
After a few weird combinations, Foxtrott and the guitar player Sandro Perri really upped the standard and it was starting to get interesting at last.
Foxtrott was joined by a jazz player and that was really interesting from the get go.
So like I was saying before with the drummer, Austin, the strangest thing with the way the stage was set is that everyone seemed so far away from each other with no direct eye contact line possible and sometimes the musicians didn't even try to look at each other.
The 2nd drummer of the night, Greg Fox. came on while Thundercat was playing and he really energized the set and it was a great moment. It felt that this jazz session was really thrilling. They looked at each other and played perfectly well together.
Kelsey Lu, cello player, came on and started while the previous duo was still playing and the guitar player extended his stay to play with her quite a bit until he was told to move on. Thundercat really seemed to enjoy the few minutes in this trio. Thundercat tried to harmonize with the Kelsey as much as he could.
Kelsey started to vocalize during the song and it was magnificent. She has quite a voice.
Kelsey continued with Mauro Pezzente on the bass and it was good as well.
We started to hear some electro when Mauro and Stefan Schneider played together which was good as well.
When Craig Pedersen entered the stage with his trumpet it was quite special. I didn't understand how, but he was using only the pistons on the trumpet to make sounds without blowing in for a few minutes. Stefan stopped hitting his drum with sticks, but started making noises by rubbing objects on his drums.
At this point, we could hear people talk loudly from the balcony and the bar which was annoying since the music wasn't loud at this point and refined.
Young Paris joined the party and started rapping and interacting with the crowd for the first time of the night. He asked the crowd to clap at different speeds and timing and continued singing.
Socalled joined the fun after this with Young Paris and they created really good beats for each other.
"So horny tonight" was Socalled lyrics during this beat.
Socalled was joined by Rebecca Foon on the cello and he was happy about it.
Socalled spoke a lot and screamed in excitement to be present at this even while playing with Rebecca.
When Rebecca started with her cello, it obviously changed the tone of the some and it was more atmospheric and electro.
Chilly Gonzales joined the stage and it started to be really fun. I like Chilly Gonzales a lot so I was really happy that he was added to the bill at the last minute and he ended the night which was amazing.
Socalled and Gonzales played together on the same synthetizer for a while until he left and stayed with Rebecca Foon.
Chilly was trying to really create something with the cello player. We could see his hands playing piano on the big screen and he his so smooth playing his instrument it is nice to see up close.
d'Eon joined Gonzales but since his tech wasn't working for a while it was up to Chilly to entertain us by himself. It was not so hard let's just say that.
He seemed to really enjoy his presence on stage and having a lot of fun and laughs with d'Eon once they started together.
d'Eon was playing in high pitch notes at first it was really far from what Gonzales was doing, but Gonzales changed to get closer to d'Eon. It was like an opera at that point.
They work making theatricals and it was so funny and awesome.
Chilly left, d'Eon was all alone for a few minutes, but finished earlier than expected because some parts of his tech was still not functioning properly so it ended the night like this.
Fun and interesting night to discover musicians jamming together and creating something for only 1 night!
