almost a week ago I had the pleasure to spend a weekend in Darmstadt/GERMANY.
Very nice city by the way, much better than I expected...
Just 5 metres outside our hotel the first poster was to be seen:
- pre-show excitement!
- 2012-07-13 Darmstadt.jpg (52.58 KiB) Viewed 13390 times
The most enjoyable moment of the whole evening was to meet Sergio again before the gig.
As I went to the concert with my wife I didn't waste too much time on the usual pre-/after-show things...
The concert itself:
Well, of course, Stewart is Stewart...it's always fun to see him play, especially his beaver face!
He didn't hit the snare that hard this time, maybe because of the fact that he's playing jazz now (instead of rock music)...
Finally, after more than 23 years, I was able to see Stanley Clarke again (after May 1989 in Cologne with ANIMAL LOGIC).
The guitar player (Brady Cohen) was quite good, I didn't see the keyboad player (Rusian Cohen) resp. his playing that much so I can't judge him (but I think he's a good guy as well).
Before the encore Stewart and Stanley left the stage and gave room for these two players to perform a song on their own. Quite nice, a good opportunity to calm down a bit.
No sign of a sax player though...were any of the other shows with a sax player?
Some pics here: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150914980631790.408475.368082256789&type=1
I had expected to hear more of Stewart's stuff, only "Birds of prey" and "Too cool hats" was a bit too less for me.
It surprised me that Stewart (being the jazz 'hater' that he is) agreed to perform such looong numbers; OK, the Stanley Clarke songs and also the Mingus composition are a welcome reason to go deeper into each song but personally I can't stand this "jazz noodlin'" that much, I'm more the straight rock guy (if you know what I mean).
[that's why I didn't like the Peggy's Blue Skylight tour of Andy Summers, for instance]
The songs were played for 7 to 12 minutes and for me it was always the same routine:
Nice start (you recognize the song, nice melody, ...),
then it goes into "improvisation nirvana" for quite a while [I don't play an instrument so please forgive my ignorance],
and after 5 to 7 minutes the band goes back to the original song structure (everything's fine here).
Originally I wanted to meet Stewart after the concert so I asked Sergio whether it would be possible to go backstage.
But he said that the best idea would be to go outside and wait at the small side entrance...unfortunately it was raining outside so we went just for a short walk to the side entrance (under a small umbrella) and then decided to leave the scene.
I'm currently preparing my audience recording so I would like to know (either from Stewart himself or from our 'Italian team') whether I'm allowed to give this recording to friends or not - just reply to this thread and let me know!
Cheers,
Rüdiger
