Location: Zagreb / Green Gold Club / Croatia
Date: May 11, 2015
Simon Phillips, one of the greatest and most revered drummers in the world, is going through a real creative bloom. After leaving art rock giants Toto in 2012, he revived his music project Protocol. Two years ago he criss-crossed Europe with the comeback album “Protocol II”, and now, two years on, the famous drummer and his well-oiled crew of top-class musicians have put together the third act of the project and, fittingly and meaningfully, titled it “Protocol III”.
The tour, called “Second Orbit”, only “grazed” Slovenia, with Simon Phillips and company stopping in nearby Graz, Austria, and Zagreb, Croatia. The latter turned out to be the much handier choice for our trip, if only for the lower travel costs. Green Gold Club in Zagreb sits in an area full of swanky office buildings and hotels. It felt downright odd walking in, since an escalator takes you up to the concert space. You could be forgiven for thinking you’d taken a wrong turn into Ljubljana’s City Park.
Simon Phillips (drums), Steve Weingart (keyboards), Andy Timmons (guitar) and Ernst Tibbs (bass) kicked off the show around half past nine in the evening. The venue was just the right size to take in some 400 fans of jazz rock fusion and progressive rock, who filled the room nicely.
The guys played the whole new album, “Protocol III”, and Simon Phillips, true to form, stepped up to the front of the stage three times to entertain the crowd with anecdotes and funny stories from his rich musical career. Of course, his innate British sense of black humor was along for the ride again.
And the playing? Divine. Speechless. Dazzling brilliance. Unbelievable precision, perception, subtlety and, above all, experience. The elements of spontaneity and surprise, the implantation of the unexpected, shone in full force. A gallery of endless jazz variations and breathtaking solos that knock the wind out of you. Ease and comfort all around. The quartet enjoyed themselves immensely and clearly felt great. They tossed off some seriously tricky passages with feather-light ease. And the crowd, of course, was in ecstasy, giving it back with full-blooded applause. All the way through. Great energy, and that feeling of contentment and fulfillment slowly settling into you, the sense that you’d come to exactly the kind of concert that can give you the most it possibly can. And all that for a ridiculously low ticket price.
All four musicians are top-notch. They’re outstanding in their versatility, in the sound that accompanies and builds their stage presence and gives each instrument a special place in the overall picture. A place that’s essential to the very existence of Protocol II. For a moment it looked as if the instruments had literally grown onto the members of the Protocol II quartet. The driving force behind the exceptionally positive energy and vibes in the room was the gift of playful lucidity that accompanies all four of these musical aesthetes. Over a full two hours onstage, it never let up, not for a second. They watch each other the whole time. Constantly. They pull all sorts of faces and use them to deliberately tease one another and even try to break each other’s concentration. It’s incredible how much looseness and fun these four guys can conjure up during their show, on top of all the demanding stuff for the ears and eyes.
For the peak of this more than brilliant two-hour show, we can take the moment when Phillips first demanded absolute silence from the audience. He walked almost to the edge of the stage and started pounding the floor with his drumsticks. Slowly he moved toward his drums on the right side of the stage, using every single stage object within reach along the way. Eventually he arrived at his kit, which he thoroughly “rattled” in true percussionist style, slowly made his way to the stool, and in a grand finale delivered one more outstanding drum solo, after which the quartet let loose on stage one last time. In the obligatory encore, the guys played two more songs from the previous album, “Protocol II”, namely Moments of Fortune and Wildfire.
This concert by Simon Phillips and his Protocol also passed in the blink of an eye. So many things simply happen on stage at once, keeping any music consumer fully engaged, that the music just takes you, and takes you, and takes you. It leads you into its own unique world of magic. The unique musical language of the brilliant, one-of-a-kind drum wizard Simon Phillips and his three virtuoso colleagues. In Zagreb that night, we dreamed all the sweetest dreams of the primal magic that the experience of jazz rock fusion can deliver. Let’s hope maestro Phillips and the crew will be back in our neck of the woods soon, because their shows are the kind of musical adventure you can never get enough of or tire of. An experience of musical perfection.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
