Just a word on the Roots. I recently managed to catch them at the Phoenix
Festival and let me say that these guys were practically the sole reason I
went along to Phoenix. What can I say about their performance besides
being dissapointed... Why?
In part I should really blame myself (and the rest of you guys!) 'cos I'd
built myself up sooooo much to see their show that I was bound to be let
down. As it turned out their was four of them there (yep, only four.) As
we know Malik B is gone, seemingly for good. This already made for a pain
in the butt as I really didn't dig Black Thought singing all Malik's lines
(and having to say all the "I'm Malik B" stuff.) However I was prepared
for this. So we have Black Thought, the keys guy (forget his name),
Brother ? and some guy on the bass, who i'm fairly sure wasn't their
regular bassist as I believe he's white. (Still, the new guy could
definetly play.) A major blow against the Roots and perhaps my greatest
dissapointment was that Rahzel was absent form the line-up. *sigh* After
all that I've heard about Rahzel I *really* wanted to see him perform...
:-( To top it all off, the crowd didn't seem to be with it though and
probably as a consequence of this there was a certain energy lacking from
the whole preformance.
Still, there was some cool bits to the show. For example they kicked it
off with a cover of Wu-Tang's "Protect Ya neck" which was nice (and a bonus
was that BT actually imporsonated the voices of each of the Wu members as
he sung there parts. this was especially evident when they did another
cover later on Ol' Dirty Bastard's "Brooklyn Zoo".) Another high-light was
when they did the hip-hop medley (that I've read about in reviews of other
Roots gigs,) covering a whole stack of classics (although I'm sure Rahzel
would have made this even better...) After about one and a half hours they
wrapped it up and as the Jazz tent was running short on time, there was no
encore. *sigh*
All i know is I was kicking myself when I came out of there and managed to
catch the last 10 minutes of Tricky on the main stage. This was the first
time I'd heard any of his stuff and I was blown away (one of the first
things i did upon getting back into london was to cruise down to HMV in
Oxford Street and buy his album.). I think that if I could travel back in
time i probably would have gone to watch him rather than the Roots....
Well, there you go. I think I was just unlucky as from all the other
concert reviews I've read the Roots normally kick in a live show.
Dino!