Fatbeat! Powerhouse Jazz / Funk from Madrid.

Fatbeat! are a  Jazz / Alt Rock / Funk / (whatever) band based in Madrid, Spain. I saw them play a stunning set in a small bar in Gijon, Spain on Friday night, parts of which left me, and the others there fortuitously assembled, quite breath-taken.

I guess you could call what they do a kind of jazz rock (long instrumentals played with expertise and chops) but the two sets played on Friday night were extremely varied and took in elements not only of Jazz but also Psychedelia, Folk, Funk, Alt Rock and even 20th Century classical music.

Formed in Madrid in 2009, they've released  two fine albums of self-composed material (available here on bandcamp). Their second album "Animals" .is a good solid modern jazz-rock album but sometimes the performances come over as a little too polite for me and it's really in a live setting that the material seems to come to life and breathe fire.

As a live band they really are a serious force to be reckoned with and if you get a chance, you should go see them play. All are very accomplished musicians but Miguel Benito, in particular, is a powerhouse of a drummer who lays down the,solid but frisky grooves the rest of the band - Mario Quiñones on guitar, Andrés Miranda on sax, keyboardist Alberto Morales and bassist Ander Garcia - are free to improvise over. And this is no revival of 70s noodling jazz fusion, the riffs here are catchy and lively and band play soulfully rather than excessively.

I think they are a band who deserve to be much more widely known. Spain has a thriving contemporary music scene and Fatbeat! are one of the best new bands (Spanish or otherwise) I've seen in a long time.

Check them out.

Here's the encore from Friday night's gig at the Cafe Plaza Doze in Gijon, Spain.

Here's a ferocious clip of them in Madrid in 2012. Crank it up.

Band website (in Spanish) http://fatbeatfatbeat.com/
On bandcamp https://fatbeatrecordings.bandcamp.com/




More stranger than known

Asturian Jazz: The Xaime Arias Trio at the Alambique, Gijon, Spain 7/8/2014

"Cool" - BBC Arena documentary

20 years of the Xixon Sound

The Cool Sound of Asturian Jazz - Carlos Pizarro...

The Return of Manta Ray - Manta Ray live

Medeski Martin and Wood - Gijon Jazz Festival

Medeski Martin and Wood played the Gijon Jazz Festival on Sunday and turned in a pretty authoritative performance of keyboard led funk jazz. The somewhat up market and seated Jovellanos Theatre is perhaps not the best place to see a trio that, for the most part, specializes in dance music - OK with a few avant garde flourishes and a drum solo but most of it leans to the foot-tapping and hip-grooving heavy funk - and there was a disconnect in first half hour or so that felt like watching a movie with an overly reverential audience providing no response at all. Very odd. A stand up venue would have been much more suitable and we'll see how Gregory Porter fares in the same venue on Saturday. However, by the end of the 90 minute set MMW had broken through the ice and finished with a stomping Hammond driven Booker T and the MGs style soul groove and then a gorgeous slow blues as encore. Definitely the two highlights of the night.

There's er... very little to see in these two clips so just enjoy the music.

  

Encore

More on stranger than known

The Horace Silver Quintet - "Song for My Father" on Danish TV 1968 

 "Cool" - BBC Arena documentary

Ronnie Scott and All That Jazz 

The Alambique - Jazz Finds a Home in Northern Spain

Pure Funk - The complete James Brown show in Bologna, April 1971

Over the last few years some pretty amazing black and white footage has appeared on Youtube of the James Brown performance at the Palasport in Bologna, Italy, in April 1971.

However the JB part of the show has now just turned up in complete form and it really is great stuff. It's JB in his prime. It's a stellar band. It's pure funk.

Thanks very much to hughenmatt for uploading the complete show.



Check it out below.
There is also a solo performance from Bobby Byrd.and the band features an 18 year-old Bootsy Collins on bass.

1. Soul Power
2. Brother Rapp
3. Aint It Funky Now?
4. Sunny
5. Bobby Byrd - I Need Help (I can't Do It Alone)
6. There Was A Time
7. Sex Machine
8. Papa's Got A Brand New Bag >
9. I Got The Feeling
10. Give It Up Or Turn It Loose
11. It's A Man's Man's World
12. Please Please Please
13. Super Bad
14. Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved

James Brown: vocals, organ
Bobby Byrd: MC, vocals, organ
Darryl "Hasaan" Jamison: trumpet
Clayton "Chicken" Gunnells: trumpet
Fred Wesley: trombone
St. Clair Pinckney: tenor saxophone
Phelps "Catfish" Collins: lead guitar
Hearlon "Cheese" Martin: rhythm guitar
William "Bootsy" Collins: bass guitar
John "Jabo" Starks: drums
Don Juan "Tiger" Martin: drums

stranger than known

James Brown's Deep Funk - No synthetic effects. No safety nets. Cold Sweat

Optimism, Positivity and SOUL POWER!

The Ike and Tina Turner Revue in Europe - February 1971

The Soul of Stax

My Radio Kras Podcasts - From Punk to Funk

When I was a around 10 or 11 years old if you'd asked me what I wanted to be in life I would have said a DJ. I used to record myself introducing the few singles I had at the time onto onto a very cheap 70s cassette player and make my own "shows".

So, in the last year or so, and thanks to Gimi at Radio Kras in Gijon, Spain, I have just recently fulfilled a kind of lifetime ambition. I guested on Gimi's show "In Campo Aperto" on Gijon's Radio Kras. The first show we did was on 70s punk and pub rock and last week we did another on 60s and 70s funk. It was great fun. You get to talk about and play the music you love with the knowledge that you might just be introducing someone somewhere to a song or performance you have loved for years.

Both shows are in Spanish and after a few beers my Spanish tends to get even more eccentric than it is usually but we made it through.

Each program tries to give a general summary of the music featured.

If anyone is interested here are the links to the 2 podcasts of the shows we did.




Funk and Soul Power (17th May 2013)
We discuss and play tracks by the following;

Al Green | Alan Toussaint | Ann Peebles | Aretha Franklin | Bernard Purdie | Cornell Dupree | Curtis Mayfield | Dr. John | Gladys Knight | Impressions | Isley Brothers | James Brown | Jr Walker | King Curtis | Lee Dorsey | Little Feat | Maceo Parker | Marvin Gaye | O. V. Wright | Otis Redding | Sam and Dave | Syl Johnson | Sly and The Family Stone | Temptations | The Meters | Wilson Pickett

Link to podcast



See my other post related to it  - Optimism, Positivity and SOUL POWER!




Punk (August 2012)
A show about mid 70s Punk rock, pre-punk and Pub Rock featuring The Velvet Underground, MC5, Stooges, Flamin Groovies, Television, Richard Hell, Dr Feelgood, Mike Spencer and the Cannibals, 101ers, Eddie and the Hot Rods, Nick Lowe, The Clash, The Sex Pistols etc.) 

You can listen to it here


Both podcasts are in Spanish but the music is universal.

James Brown's Deep Funk - No synthetic effects. No safety nets... Cold Sweat.

In 1967, the year of Sgt Pepper, when popular music seemed to be trying to become ever more complex and sophisticated, James Brown decided to buck the trend and strip everything right down to the basics. The Funk. The one. He put out a record called Cold Sweat.

Cold Sweat was basically just a groove that just kept on building. From 1967 on this was pretty much JB's template on all his single releases. Forget the words or the tune, those are for "listening" to, this is for dancing.

Arguably more influential than the rest of the Sgt Pepper styled psychedelic complexity of 1967, James Brown hit on one of the most important and influential ideas of the late 60s. The funk revolution emphasized rhythm, made everything else subservient to it, including the vocals, and relegated melody and lyrics to a mere supporting role. Guitars became percussion instruments and individual parts became syncopated within the whole musical arrangement. And in so doing, he pretty much invented modern dance music and had a massive influence on rap. James Brown is the most sampled artist in the world.

However, the important thing for me is that, unlike a lot of modern dance records, on most of the old JB hits the band played live. And it feels alive. It breathes. You can hear the drummer sweat. Dance music always seems to me to be far more intense, hypnotic and dangerous when it's being played live with no mechanical input, no drum machines, no synthetic effects and no safety nets. A machine will suck out the funk. It'll be precise. It'll play on the beat. Not behind or in front. So there's no tension. There's no sense that anything could go wrong, speed up, slow down or do something weird.

I know there was a lot of discipline in JB's bands which the musicians sometimes found difficult to deal with (see the 1968 Apollo Can't Stand It clip below as a glorious example of how much that discipline paid off) but there's also a sense of unpredictability and danger. There is tension. And here is release. And when the tension builds, the release can sometimes be truly sublime. On the (superior) version of Cold Sweat on the 1967 Live at The Apollo album the band go into a solid groove during Maceo Parker's sax solo (starting around the 2:00 mark on the clip below) while the drummer, the great Clyde Stubblefield, compliments and pushes Maceo onward to the climax of the solo (around the 3:30 mark). For a very brief moment drummer and saxophonist are soloing together. Without the drummer performing the usual anchoring function the band appears to leave the ground and levitate.

Cold Sweat live at the Apollo 1967

It is evident towards the end of that remarkable performance (one of my favourite ever pieces of JB music) that this music, though apparently simple, is not easy to play. It's intense and demanding and easy to foul up. What is not played is just as important as what is played. That's the funk part. However it's the human element, the amazing proficiency and timing of everyone in that band, plus the sweat and the danger and the funk, that make it so damned hypnotic. And danceable.
And that is where the art is.



Bonus
Mother Popcorn on TV in 1969
An astonishing band performance. On Maceo Parker's solo (around the 3 minute mark) the band let the brakes off to hit overdrive while JB duets with Maceo by way of yelps, screeches and screams.