Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Ljubljana / Gala hala (Metelkova) / Slovenia
Concert date: April 24, 2012
Attendance: 100
Three madmen! Guitar wizard Vernon Reid, virtuoso bassist Jamaaladeen Takuma and drumming jazz powerhouse Grant Calvin Weston! Nothing less than three total musical lunatics. And for the second time at Channel Zero! The birth of the fusion-minded Free Form Funky Freqs is fatefully tied to what these three did with saxophonist and trumpeter Ornette Coleman, after an unplanned turn of events. F.F.F.F. played their first European tour back in fall 2007 and released the album »Urban Mithology Vol 1.« around that time. They first visited Slovenia not long after, at the end of May 2009, playing first at the Satchmo club in Maribor and then at Channel Zero in Ljubljana.
All three have schedules packed to the brim. The biggest name of the trio today is certainly Vernon Reid, who made his name with the huge success of Living Colour at the turn of the eighties into the nineties. Reid’s reputation is outstanding; just to list a few of the names he’s worked with in his career, there’s Eddie Hazel, Carlos Santana, Buddy Guy, Bobby Drayton, Michael Hill, Calvin Bell and Jean-Paul Bourelly, among others.
Jamaaladeen Takuma, born Rudy McDaniel, built his name in Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time, and over his career has worked with the likes of James “Blood” Ulmer, Walt Dickerson, David Moss, Chuck Hammer, Kip Hanrahan, Derek Bailey and David Murray.
Grant Calvin Weston is no less important a name in Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time, and he has also shared his skills with other masters of experimental music, such as James »Blood« Ulmer, Billy Martin (Medeski, Wood & Martin), John Lourties (Lounge Lizzards), plus various projects with musicians like Marc Ribot, Christy Doran, Derek Bailey, John Zorn, James Carter, Jean-Paul Bourelly and Melvin Gibbs.
Interestingly, both Vernon Reid and Jamaaladeen Takuma had already visited Ljubljana back in 1993. Both of them. Jamaaladeen Takuma played with his crew on April 20, 1993 in the Linhart Hall of Cankarjev dom (back then he was swinging a Steinberger bass, decked out in futuristic »matrix like« gear and black shades) to present the album »Sound Symphony« (brought to Ljubljana by Brane Rončel, naturally). Not long after, on June 23, 1993, Vernon Reid stepped up to the front of the stage at Hala Tivoli in Ljubljana with his Living Colour. Living Colour were touring Europe with the album »Staind« at the time (that Living Colour show in Ljubljana was organized by Škuc Ropot of Igor Vidmar). Clearly something fateful was already hanging in the air back then, something that many years later would bring the life paths of the two musicians to a common meeting point.
The biographical intro was long, and on purpose, so you get a picture of the exceptional musical profile behind this »structure« of free funk jazz experiment. This trio is the real answer to the classic hard-hitting rock trio. In punch it’s far more explosive, if anything, and on top of that incredibly spontaneous and unpredictable. Serious mileage and constant playing forge you into such a powerful figure that you’re forced to set yourself new artistic challenges again and again. Free Form Funky Freqs are the embodiment of that joy of the endless exploring spirit of musical open-mindedness, personified by the trio and driven relentlessly forward by it.
It’s a little past ten in the evening when the club’s walls, floor and ceiling first shake to deep, voluminous funk rhythms. Right at the start Takuma’s bass was too loud, but the sound guy quickly dialed the sonic character into the right balance, which lifted the atmosphere of the tight club bond between band and crowd that night.
The place wasn’t packed, but the crowd of just under 100 heads proved with their attendance that there’s no shortage of true believers looking for a real connection with an eclectic, »unhinged« musical philosophy, avant-garde too, if you like. In short, that something in music that uncovers dimensions often veiled from the ears of the masses. It’s the character of the free musical information of the universe, which the little guy, in today’s flood of everything, finds and makes out less and less, if at all.
Vernon Reid, Jamaaladeen Takuma and Grant Calvin Weston are in the form of their lives, and they showed it instantly at Channel Zero that night. In an hour and fifty minutes they played pretty much the entire album »Urban Mithology« and added a few of their favorite numbers to the mix, the kind that make concert experiences always a one-of-a-kind, unforgettable adventure of full-blooded attraction, for the musicians and especially for the audience, like love at first sight.
Miracles, in the sense of a snowball not melting in a blazing furnace, don’t happen, of course. F.F.F.F. weren’t sent by God to walk on water, and yet. Many times during a show the trio, who play half with their eyes shut (especially true of Takuma, who almost never turned to look at Reid or Weston), spin off completely spontaneously onto some new, uncharted playground of free jazzing, where they feel each other out for a few moments and then twist on into a new motif. At the next show that motif will show up in a totally different light, or won’t show up at all, and some completely different lead motif will take its place and define a new mood and a new position. That’s exactly the quality that makes this band so appealing and unique. The guys seem to be in a trance, with strong chemistry and perfect communication between them, the kind you can’t find parallels for, or only with great difficulty.
Compared to the 2007 experience in Velden, over the years since the guys have adjusted a bit to the ears of the masses. They’ve partly climbed down from the often harder-to-crack, even progressively complex forms and eased them with a string of melodic lines, where Vernon unleashed a simple, metal-driven riff, tamed with full sonic control, which gave Jamaaladeen Takuma a free path to fill the loosened-up space with a devilish funk groove and a frenzy of solo expansions, during which he let out quite a few inarticulate yells, so deep was he in his role. It was precisely those moments, when the funk impression came strongly to the surface, that totally enchanted the crowd, who swayed freely through the show in front of the stage. The power of fusing funk and free-form jazz with a touch of a sharpened metal riff, which Vernon brings from Living Colour! That’s it, and Vernon’s Messa Boogie was singing like a nightingale again. More subdued than with Living Colour, though.
A Free Form Funky Freqs show is musical hypnosis like no other. The last show of the band’s new European tour was so intense it brought the club to roaring ovations that just wouldn’t die down, yet the band didn’t come back for a second encore. Funny thing is, whenever the members of Living Colour aren’t being Living Colour, they keep roaming the stages of Europe. It’s not hard to run into them on the Austria-Slovenia route when they play under the banner of various projects. Just three days after this Funk From Freqs show in Ljubljana, Vernon’s Living Colour colleague Doug Wimbish plays the Bluesiana club in Velden in Carinthia, with a brand-new experimental band called The Help!, and RockLine will report back from there too with another in-depth write-up, checking what kind of form the Living Colour bassist is in right now.
Photo gallery
