How come in all these glowing reviews no one's mentioned any of the tunes they've been playing?
Cuz we're all too busy being blown away by the music to make a piddly set list, DUH! Enjoy the show!!
Fortunately, while RTF's king-fu is indeed strong, it is no match for my powers of concentration! Last night's set list was:
- Hymn Of The Seventh Galaxy
- Vulcan Worlds
- The Sorceress
- Celebration Suite
- some brief baroque-sounding interlude that served as the setup for Al's solo
- Al's unaccompanied solo
- No Mystery
- The Romantic Warrior (which contained/framed Chick, Stanley, & Lenny's unaccompanied solo's, plus a really sweet jazz waltz performed by the three of them)
- The Duel Between The Jester & The Tyrant
Very enjoyable, I'm really glad I finally got to see/hear these guys live. Was I "blown away" ? Eh, not exactly. But that no doubt has more to do with my interests growing away from the testosterone-fueled pyrotechnics of fusion in the last 30 years than any shortcomings of Return To Forever's. It was amazing to hear people perform this material live (and without charts!), makes me wonder what it was like to hear the first time around.
I was
really pleased to hear that Stanley & Al have both expanded their harmonic vocabularies beyond the one-dimensional modal stagnation that infused so much of their solos in the 1970's. But Chick still manages to muster more
music in just 3 or 4 chords than Stanley or Al do in a 4-minute solo full of 32nd-notes.
And Stanley certainly knows how to be an Entertainer, but as a fellow bassist I could've really done with a lot less of the crowd-pleasing gimmicks (i.e., the rhythmic schtick where he mutes the strings with his left hand and beats out fast rhythms on them like a bongo or tabla with his right)...yeah, yeah, it's tight & fast & sounds cool, but please dude, more melodies! He's clearly capable; laid down a monster groove all night long, locked in with Lenny like a machine even when they were firing off 32nd-note unisons, and Stan's solo in "Celebration Suite" had some moments that were so beautiful, unexpected, athletic, yet tasteful, melodic, & harmonically rich that I almost stopped breathing.
Yeah, I heard the distortion on his upright too.
We were up in the balcony box seats. Great show by both R2F and the Flecktones and the fans were cool too!
