How fking awesome are The Bays? Every Sat @ Jazz Cafe this month.

[Tripi Taka]

www.thebays.com <- have a read.

saw them for the first time at big chill and was completely and utterly blown away. had been told not to miss them, and goddamn i'm grateful fo that.

definitely in the running fo best BC set. :bow: my god, it was amazing.

"Turning up to the venue, the Bays set up, line check and play ... they never rehearse, have no 'set-list' because they don't have 'songs' to perform and hence could never do the same gig twice. Drawing energy from the audience, they enter into a creative partnership, receiving feedback from the dancefloor and reinterpreting that response. The band have no studio album and have no intention of releasing any material in the immediate future."

..but you can download tracks from the site. check it out and go see em!

i'm heading to JC this sat.. and prolly once or twice more in the coming weeks. their sets are fresh and improvised, completely different every time.


/end rant :)

[lordhuk]

Thanks, had a listen to the mp3 on their website last night - a really nice organic sound. Will be sure to check them out on an upcoming Saturday.

[sumphreak]

who?

[Tripi Taka]

um, the bays.


:P

[Tripi Taka]

my god, the vibe was electric !!

london wins. there would never have been a gig like that in syd. not in a million fking years. for a band that has never produced an album to have a QUEUE outside the club, and PACKED inside.. that's just fking cool, that is.

DO NOT MISS these gigs. I will mos definitely be back for another - leaning twds the last sat of the month if anyone is keen for a gay meeting. Ed will prolly be there with scones.

The drummer is fking amazing. Was talking to a guy who knew him and apparently he was drummer for Incognito, and ..there was another one but I forget.

set full of EVERYTHING!! oh it was soo lush. and just as i was giving up hope of hearing some of the phat dnb they played in their big chill set.. they slammed some out right at the end. it was lovely. :blush:

[Funky Dung]

Yeah, they were very good. Extremely impressive technically (we were right up close, so I was being nerdy and watching how they improvised everything, and it was all for real), but as with all improvised music, it meant there were periods where you kinda wished something a little more co-ordinated and composed would kick in, but them's the breaks.

Very dancey, with the drummer hammering out some excellent techno beats on his digital kit and the bass player tweaking out some cool acid lines with a bank of FX pedals, plus the basic structure fits to dance music phrasing, so you can actually full-on club dance to an improvised jazz band, which is quite a novelty. :)

Got a couple of busy Saturdays coming up, but will definitely aim to get back for the last one.

Funky Dung

[Tripi Taka]

just to let you know.. they are only playing the 8th, 15th, and 22nd. NOT the 29th.

8th - Howells
15th - Garnier
20th - London Electricity
22nd - Bays
28th - Scruff

that's the definites. there is a 'mebbe' list three times as long with every date in between :meh:

[lil_jazz]

ah tripi... bless. it's like listening to myself 2 years ago... you're discovering the sounds on offer in london big style. xx

[Tripi Taka]

i'm so overwhelmed!

is london gon make me jaded?

[lil_jazz]

you already are. ;-)

[Jentai]

sounds good! :thumb:

Hmmm will definately have to catch them on the 15th me thinks...

[Tripi Taka]

:lol: you can't call ME jaded!

with all my raaaving posts about how fab everything is?

lil bit fussy p'haps, but far from jaded.


ED is jaded. (and GAY)

[Charlies_Lounge]

Gotta go check this out from the sound of things...

[Tripi Taka]

oh and remember: 1/2 price with a flyer

..makes it 6 quid.

(they were handing them out to the people waiting in the queue :lol: )

anyone know if it's possible to get some sort of membership happenin w/ jazz cafe? i'd spend almost every night there if it didn't cost me ;)

[Tripi Taka]

ok this saturday. yep yep. :)

[Jentai]

Tried to go last sat but twas sold out :(

hopefully can get there this week...

[Sellout_1]

So they are a Jazz band that improvise at all of their shows?

Where is the Jazz cafe?

[LEO10]

Yeah where is the Jazz Cafe ??? Details please

[LEO10]

Jazz Cafe
5 Parkway
Camden Town
London NW1 7PG


Opening Times
Monday - Thursday:
7pm - 1am
Friday & Saturday:
7pm - 2am
Sunday:
7pm - 12 midnight


website is http://www.meanfiddler.com/displayPage_jazz.asp?PageID=387

[Tripi Taka]

ok.. it's right opposite camden tube station.

gig is 11-2am

get there just before 11 and make sure you grab a flyer fo cheap entry. there was a queue already by 11.15 when we went.

anyone down for catching up in the queue, pm me your numbers.. or just shout 'ED IS GAY' really loudly when you get there.

yes. it's basically a jam session. always good. promise.

[Tripi Taka]

:bow: insane.

(hope some of you made it??!)

fking brilliant. competely different from the other sets i've seen. no overlap whatsoever in terms of what they played. absolutely fking phenomenal.

they had guitarists Matt White and Bluey from Incognito jamming with them this time, which worked brilliantly! added a whole lotta depth to the overall sound, and the set was far more diverse because of what they were able to cover.

although the place was rammed, the crowd didn't seem to be die-hard fans like the previous gig. vibe was still fantastic, but not QUITE as intense - well, perhaps it was towards the end. i'm assuming there were a lot of newbies there who'd been told to check em out before this series of gigs finished up. makes sense.



Stumbled across this somewhere, think it sums em up nicely:

"The Bays don't rehearse. They go on stage and start playing, and what they play goes through a multitude of moods and grooves, from simple, repetitive riffs to dense swathes of electronic noise. The music is both familiar and fresh: everything is improvised, newly minted, yet based upon the myriad electronic dance-music traditions - stretching from early studio reggae and Kraftwerk to Juan Atkins, Aphex Twin and beyond, via scores of obscure white labels and dub plates. The four members of the Bays - drummer-founder Andy Gangadeen, bassist Chris Taylor and keyboard and effects men Jamie Odell and Simon Richmond - were once faceless sessioneers and programmers. Now they're the opposite of anonymous; visible, opinionated and hard-working activists, going out on a limb to push their music into the future.

Yet though they command huge respect in certain zones of the industry, for many, the Bays are off the map. The reason: they don't make "product". You can't buy CDs or 12-inch singles by the Bays. Taylor says: "The performance is the product." You can't help admire their stance, which is the logical outcome of a collective, collaborative way of playing. Gangadeen says: "It's got be pure." The Bays remind you that music is about experience rather than shopping. Richmond points out that making records may be "an aberration in the history of music", which has always been about performance.

Yet the music culture on which the Bays draw is not jazz, free improvisation or world music (areas bursting with gifted musicians whose gigs routinely outshine their recordings), but dance music, a genre obsessed with vinyl and dominated by non-musicians. Disc jockeys have been putting musicians out of work for years - is this some kind of revenge? In fact, DJ sets are part of the inspiration for what the Bays do in performance: Richmond has been inspired by "minimal techno gigs where the DJ builds up an atmosphere that's led by the audience". The room, the sound, the time of day, the crowd - these factors can make a big difference when everything is improvised. Are the Bays led by the audience? "It's not a focus group!" they say. "It's a compromise between what we want to play and what they want," muses Taylor.

Gangadeen's original aim was to improvise with electronic music combining the "music department" of bass and drums with the "science department": keyboards, delays and samples. The Bays put bass and drums in the foreground, but Richmond and Odell have more to do than making funny noises over killer grooves; there are times when they play keyboard bass lines, or percussion. "It's fun when we swap roles," says Odell. "We have such an insane sweet-shop of sounds," adds Richmond. And no one solos in the Bays: it's improvised, but it's not jazz. Sometimes they invite guests to join them, such as rapper Ty, or guitarist Bluey (from Incognito).

The four musicians discuss the feedback cycle of electronic music performance, where musicians play like machines, and machines mimic musicians and so on. Superficially, the Bays' set may sound like your favourite techno tunes, but there's an extra degree of engagement when you realise that every note is being made by the guys in front of you. That's why they connect so strongly with their fans. "There's no faking what we do," they say.

There's no clear route to the glittering prizes, however, without a record company to underwrite the tours. (The current tour, starting tonight, is a Contemporary Music Network tour with Richard Barbieri and Matt White.) Taylor is upbeat. "People have a better attitude now," he says. "They seem to have more cash to spend on live music, because they're not spending so much on CDs." Richmond ponders the implication: "So illegal downloading is actually fuelling renewed interest in live music!" "

[Charlies_Lounge]

Missed this because of a lame birthday and missed Ben Watt and Ian Pooley the previous night because of the damn flu :mad: Shit weekend...

[Funky Dung]

I agree. They were excellent on Saturday. Much better than the other week - it really was like live funky Detroit techno. :thumb: