ateolf | Herbie

During the day, a few things. Did a little bit of preparation for that show coming up (TONIGHT! need to do some more preparation the rest of today!). We had that Miss Myra's barbecue we picked up on the way out of Birmingham for dinner and it was a good vestige of our trip! Then at night Mary Beth and I went out to GPAC to see Herbie Hancock! I wasn't sure what to expect for this show, but holy shit was it good!! A lot of it, especially in the beginning, they were sounding a bit like the Mwandishi-era band (not quite as out-there and heavy as Sextant but a bit close to Mwandishi/Crossings and that's still like...holy shit!). He did a lot of stuff throughout his career, but they were in a pretty exploratory vein. He started off by asking everyone if they want to hear weird music. And we was talking about this keyboard he had and pulled up a DX-7 kinda piano sounding preset and was like, nah I'm not going to play this, then changed it to a preset of some growling/roaring kind of noises and he was like this is called "Predator" and something about it sounding like dinosaurs and he's just kind of playing around and amusing himself with it for a minute. Then they start in and it's awesome. During the first part, what he called afterwards "the overture" the guitarist was playing solo for a minute, doing lots of pedal-heavy stuff and for a minute he started playing the "Rockit" melody and Herbie was watching and started just laughing real big. At one point in the middle (a little towards the end), Herbie went on a long thing (maybe close to ten minutes, at least five anyway) where he's playing with the vocoder and doing this long monologue through the vocoder about how you should say "thank you" to your phones and such. Mostly he was playing the grand piano with his workstation synthesizer to the side going back and forth a good bit. But for the last run of songs he went back and picked up the keytar. And at one point in the solos he's facing the guitarist and he starts jumping in time to the music. It's like damn, that's some fuckin' energy for an 85 year old man!! Also, his playing all night was just so fuckin' on point. It was all just mind-blowingly great.