Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Vrba na Koroškem (Velden Am Wörthersee) / Bluesiana Rock Cafe / Austria
Concert date: October 15, 2014
Attendance: 50
Ticket price: €30.00 (advance) / €34.00 (day of show)
What does a gig look like when there’s simply no way to describe it properly with everyday earthly vocabulary? Right, you can’t. Humankind on the blue planet, at times »downright pathetic«, still hasn’t managed to invent all the words, maybe not even to evolve the right brain processors for picking up the information certain performers occasionally deliver to you. All you can give them is a deep bow for their artistic genius. Some 50 curious souls gathered at Bluesiana that night, which, considering the reputation of the drumming grandmaster, his highness, the one and only Virgil Donati, is a pretty sorry, even humiliating number, but still. Those who dropped into this gorgeous club in the middle of Vrba na Koroškem that night were more than richly rewarded. They witnessed the execution of perfect progressive-rock deviance, which you can only describe as a shot straight to the chest by a one-of-a-kind intergalactic adventure into the world of artistic eclecticism.
So who the hell is Australian Virgil Donati, and why does he deserve an intro like that? At 15 Virgil Donati had already joined the Australian band Taste, and at 19 he headed to the US to study drumming, where he threw himself into exploring the musical horizons of jazz, pop and rock. During that time Virgil worked as a studio musician in the theater. Later, when he founded Southern Sons, his name got real international recognition for the first time. In 1995 Donati released his highly acclaimed studio achievement titled “Stretch”. Over his career Donati has performed with stars like Melissa Etheridge, Dave Stewart, Mick Jagger, Frank Gambale and Steve Vai, and played in Planet X, Steve Vai Band, Freakhouse, Tribal Tech, CAB and Ring of Fire, as well as with solo artists like Derek Sherinian, Steve Walsh and Mark Boals.
The quartet, made up of Virgil Donati (drums), Anthony Craword (bass), Adnre Nieri (guitar) and Isarmu McGregor (keyboards), delivered an extremely fragmented experimental musical adventure in which the world of progressive rock and progressive metal freely shakes hands with the world of jazz, or rather free-form jazz. Remember Simon Philips and his Protocol II at Cvetličarna last year? In terms of difficulty, Virgil Donati Band is a test several times more potent than Protocol II. Let’s say that with Protocol II you can follow when Philips explains what a 13/15 time signature is, and I do mean “let’s say”, while with Donati the perception of the lay listener fails completely. You’d have to be a music professor, or Marco Minnemann. As an average music fan, you honestly have no idea what’s going on onstage at any given moment. Too many notes go off per unit of time in a sequence of atonal phrases that are extremely rhythmically fragmented (shredded). Crawford and Donati literally hunt for each other, can’t wait to dive into counter-rhythmic structures, which are then gnawed at by the scattered atonal forms of Nieri and McGregor. Anyone who knows Planet X wasn’t surprised. Virgil Donati heavily showcased his current studio album »In this Life« (2013), a hugely fascinating piece of work on which the master once again proved that in how he processes musical information he is literally untouchable, and played about half of all its songs. They lean strongly toward what we know from Virgil’s work in Planet X.
Virgil Donati has always been a big fan of adventurous musical escapism from established forms, the musical »wizardry« known from the body of work of the esteemed and deeply respected British guitar wizard Allan Holdsworth. To that end the band played as many as five Holdsworth numbers in the second half of the show, from his three studio albums of the mid-eighties. From the album Road Games (1983) we enjoyed two songs, Material Real and Water on the Brain, with the title track of »Metal Fatigue« (1985) squeezed in between them, and the encore also went to playing Holdsworth’s work, when Looking Glass from Holdsworth’s album »Atavachron« (1986) and Panic Storm from the aforementioned »Metal Fatigue« (1985) rang out back to back. A few lost fans of the Planet X catalog got their fix too, when the band tackled The Thinking Stone and Kingdom Of Dreams in a row!
When you watch and enjoy a band like Virgil Donati Band, you can’t stop marveling at the boundless stage brilliance and flawless playing through the extremely complex creations these musicians come up with. You just can’t describe it properly in words. There’s only one way. Go to a gig and be stunned as you freely give yourself over to the musical magic. You’re left speechless. Enchanted and »hooked« on the magic created by the brilliance of these four aliens. Add the fact that the Bluesiana stage is lit by three or four »little bulbs« and that Nieri and McGregor were condemned to playing in near darkness, and it quickly becomes clear how much grinding (read: practice, practice and practice) went into their personal musical résumés. On top of the talents laid in the cradle. Nieri is such a master that he can easily compete with the greatest guitarists the free-spirited world of musical experimentation knows, led by Steve Vai. Frank Zappa would have invited Nieri into his band right away, had he still been alive.
Musically, Virgil Donati Band is manna for the biggest connoisseurs, those looking for an unusual, eclectic, utterly bonkers exploratory form of music. One that can’t stand being locked into forms, only breaking through them or fusing them together. After the Virgil Donati Band experience, you’re left rooted to the spot after the show, deeply steeped in the feelings created by the quartet’s one-of-a-kind musical world. The sweet state of total shock therapy just won’t wear off.
After The Aristocrats in March, Bluesiana got its second top-notch concert spectacle of the year, written into a unique progressive-eclectic oath. It’s a minor point that Donati made sure the club hosted the biggest drum kit it has seen to date in all its years of operation. Marco Minnemann and Carl Palmer have played here, among others, but their kits didn’t serve up such a gigantic fortress as Donati’s. Virgil Donati did already play Bluesiana back in 2007 with Devil’s Slingshot (the lineup was filled out at the time by Billy Sheehan and Tony MacAlpine), and after Donati’s return visit it’s apparently time for Terry Bozzio to light up Bluesiana. Let’s be surprised.
Setlist
1. In this Life
2. Voice of Reason
3. Trinity
4. Eleven
5. Rhythm Zero
6. Red Air
7. Material Real
8. Metal Fatigue
9. Water on the Brain
10. Iceland
11. The Thinking Stone
12. Kingdom of Dreams
13. The Empire
—-encore—
14. Looking Glass
15. Panic Station
Photo gallery
