The second and last night of String Cheese Incident's New Orleans stand offered the same kind of focus and rhythmic intensity the first did, but a more varied bag of tunes and moods. Here, with an audience as tolerant and expectant as any they encountered on this month-long juggernaut, they turned up the heat and reached for the four corners of their musical universe and attempted to bring it all into play. Disc one opens with a long version -- ven by the band's standard -- of "Miss Brown's Teahouse" and skips off the deep ...
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The second and last night of String Cheese Incident's New Orleans stand offered the same kind of focus and rhythmic intensity the first did, but a more varied bag of tunes and moods. Here, with an audience as tolerant and expectant as any they encountered on this month-long juggernaut, they turned up the heat and reached for the four corners of their musical universe and attempted to bring it all into play. Disc one opens with a long version -- ven by the band's standard -- of "Miss Brown's Teahouse" and skips off the deep end into Townes Van Zandt's "White Freightliner Blues." It's a six-and-a half-minute version that offers nice, quick fretwork by Bill Nershi and an odd but really inventive bassline by Keith Moseley. The set continues with one more jam sandwiched between two tunes, which is Kyle Hollingsworth's "Bam!" It's a cool jump-off point for the rhythmic and harmonic orgy that comes next with a funkier than hell version of Weather Report's "Birdland" that segues more or less into the New Orleans jam that is bled into with about a minute of the Meters' "Cissy Strut." From here on, until near the end of the show, the band just goes crazy, throwing anything and everything into the bag, and it works: "Texas," "It Is What It is," "Land's End," another jam called "Big Easy" followed by "Hotel Window," the traditional nugget "John Hardy" -- and not since the Gun Club in the early '80s has anyone done such an original reading of it -- and the gorgeous "Best Feeling," which gives way to "Smile" and an encore of Bob Dylan's "Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)." What makes this grab bag of jams so interesting is the looseness of the band's approach combined with their sheer contemplative genius of their concentration: They keep it all straight, there is no hodge-podge musical schizophrenia, and they treat each tune as its own part to be sure, but also as a segment, a fragment of a musical universe that SCI is in the process of designing every night they play. Therefore, the jump cuts in style and tone and rhythm are woven into an ethereal fabric of pleasure and aesthetic beauty. This is a stunner. ~ Thom Jurek, Rovi
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Add this copy of April 27, 2002-New Orleans, La: on the Road to cart. $21.99, good condition, Sold by Bookmans rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Tucson, AZ, UNITED STATES, published 2002 by Sci Fidelity Records.
