Venue: Bluesiana Rock Cafe / Velden Am Woerthersee / Austria
Concert date: 12.11.2007
Attendance: 50
Ticket price: 26,00€ / 29,00€
Welcome back, all you folks with thirsty ears, where else but Bluesiana. Devil’s Slingshot (MacAlpine/Sheehan/Donati) had barely left the building, and here comes the all-black answer to what “power trio” is supposed to mean, going by the name Free Form Funky Freqs. It would sound perfectly ordinary if the name didn’t hide gods of their own musical domains: Vernon Reid (guitar, the cornerstone of Living Colour), Jamaaladeen Takuma (bass) and Grant Calvin Weston (drums), who build on their basic weapon, the elemental natural chemistry of sensing each other during a shared stage jam. The guys met by chance, at Weston’s initiative, on stage (the first time ever playing together in their careers) and realized they were born to be a hard-hitting trio. These are three utterly unique musicians who demand huge amounts of freedom, which they seek for their self-expression in total free jazz / funk experimentation. A superior energy flux, sparked the moment they step up together, sets the trio in motion at a level you can hardly imagine until you experience it yourself at an F.F.F.F. show.
The guys basically made their debut out of “nothing” and released “Urban Mythology Volume One” (2007), which made up most of their set at Bluesiana. Before heading into the studio, they had played live together as a formation just twice, and that formation later gave birth to F.F.F.F. It’s based on playing that really knows form without form. So, a total shot from the hip with no thinking, built on genuine chemistry of sensing each other. After a lazy start in front of a poorly attended Bluesiana this time, the guys began eagerly warming up their palm bones.
Unbelievably, the feeling was completely different from three days earlier, when Devil’s Slingshot played here. Takuma literally blinked his way through the gig, and Reid is already known for hiding his face under a Cuban cap! Only Weston kept in touch with the small crowd, with sporadic shouts from his wave of enthusiasm, as he pounded his drum fortress deep in a trance of personal disconnect, inside the wrecking funk groove this trio is capable of developing.
Reid can do anything. Metalhead, jazzer, Hendrix. Whatever you want, you get. But Reid goes beyond all that, because F.F.F.F. gives him the chance to take the wildest paths in expressing his take on, and perception of, the musical realm. Reid is the main factor that gives the band its dose of melody and the level of absorbability for the listener. And believe me, that is nowhere near easy. Anyone who finds their way into the, on first listen, “illogical” adventures of totally avant-garde playing, without carefully crafted and dutifully dressed-up motifs, can scoop from the magic of F.F.F.F. with a big spoon, and keep doing it for a very long time, always feeding their hungry musical soul properly.
Watching F.F.F.F. on stage is an incredible experience because everything runs like clockwork for them. Apparently the real key to the band’s success is precisely their absolute individual divergence, which, when the instruments weave together on stage, works like an ideal hinge. Everything rests on primal feeling, without a speck of empiricism, it’s all just a naked run, no thinking. All three find a boundless amount of room to maneuver and shape their free musical form so that they never cross each other’s carefully tuned notes.
Reid tried out a whole pleiad of effects pedals keeping him company down by his feet. He wandered from fired-up metal riffs, through classic jazz-funky semi-acoustic sounds, to stringing together webs of sonic palettes by playing with delay effects. Takuma took your breath away with extreme softness and venomously sharp speed, and the same goes for Weston, except he could be seriously rough on the skins and crash cymbals. Reid’s work soared high above an incredible, grounding funk groove of a solid, lavishly melodic and wittily communicative rhythm line, and with that accompaniment he pretty much indulged in every guitar perversion a guitarist needs for his expression. Of course it never went beyond stretched-out solo spots, but the fact that the guys are totally in their own world during the show was confirmed time and again by the endings of the songs, when, deep in the total groove, they somehow had to wrap a song up. A few times they did it by Reid simply being the first to stop playing. Then Takuma woke from his rapture and fell silent after him, and from the stage you could only hear Weston’s crashing, which then closed out those moments of the show.
In short, a perfect experimental funk jazz drive, loaded with primal untamed energy and the superior innate sense of following the “beat” in all three musicians, spoiled the small crowd for an hour and three quarters, encore included. An experience you don’t get every day, an experience of natural flux generated by the primal instinct of musicians sensing one another through individually completely different musical perception, which together results in a totally unique legacy. In sync the whole way through in a trance, with no determined form, loaded with spontaneity and unpredictability. Perfect order, whose arrangement is built on stringing together boldly adventurous, exploratory fragments of private chaotic associations and initiations. Shocking and bonkers. A rediscovered fusion of the legendary notion of the power trio, in the best and truest sense of the words!
The practically brilliant excitement was dampened a bit only by the small turnout at Bluesiana and the aforementioned unapproachability of the musicians, which stems from their temperament (it’s unfair to blame them for it, really) and shows itself not so much as shyness as modesty, which is also why the crowd watched the show from a cautious distance of three meters from the stage. Maybe the indescribably greedy tour manager could reflect on his avarice, when he offered the F.F.F.F. debut “Urban Mythology Volume 1” for 20,00€. Poor guy.
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