Jamie Lidell Goes on Synth-infused Funk and Soul Bender
What does this guy sound like? queries one audience member to the next. Uhh, hes kinda like soul [yes], funk [definitely], jazz [uh huh], Americana [not really]...I dunno. But hes really good. The genre-blender is right on the money, but subtract Americana and add clubby dance synths. And vocoders. And keep the really good part. [Jamie Lidell], the British-born, blue-eyed-soul singer put on a fiery spectacle on his second night at Bowery.
Lidell spun onto the stage looking like the total square in black thick-framed glasses, pleated pants, a gold and black patterned jacket and neatly cropped hair. A goofy grin wiggled its way onto his face after each vocal riff he belted; not exactly the picture of cool at first that his smooth vocal might suggest. He and his four-piece band mostly kept to songs from his latest album, Jim, opening with Another Day and throwing in a spirited version of Out Of My System early in the show. But just as things got cozy and familiar, Lidell ditched his glasses and his bandmates jumped off stage, leaving Lidell to geek out on his laptops and synthesizer, layering vocals, beatboxing and firing off glitchy clubbed-out synth moves for a solid 15 or so minutes. The audience responded to the dance music sounds with mixed emotions, some clearly baffled as to why the soulful jammer ventured into this territory. He might have lost fans of his funky jazz vibe during this segment, but the transformation of his music into something so separate from what was expected was impressive.
From then on, Lidell dipped back into more audience-friendly tunes, but he couldnt help but shake things up by injecting more synthesizer-generated sounds into his songs. Lidell closed with a disguised, sharper version of the hit Multiply, clapped out by the audience in double time. Alterations to even his most popular tracks might've been tough pills for audience members to swallow, including mister genre-blender, but Lidell's approach was refreshing. Here was a guy who was not just putting on a show for fans of the album tracks verbatim; he was putting on a performance with lights, colors, video footage, sounds, styles, props, sweat and dance moves, and reminding an audience of why live music reigns supreme.
[Photo by Lindsey Matthews on Flickr]