Before the show even started, there was a lot of energy in the room. Oftentimes, just after the doors first open, there's a hushed indifference in the room, as the few people present mutter to one another and shuffle around the nearly empty venue. But last night, we arrived at The Earl just five or ten minutes after the doors had opened, and the place was already a quarter full and folks were talking loudly to one another, enjoying their beer and cocktails, and generally having fun.
Welcome to Saturday night in East Atlanta, Fourth of July weekend.
Little Tybee is an Atlanta-based band slowly developing a national if not international following, and last night was the last show of their summer tour. Their local fans were excited to hear them return, but at least many of those gathered early around the stage seemed just as excited to hear opener Rotem Sivan, an emerging young jazz guitarist with a bright potential future.
It was our first time hearing the Israeli-born Rotem play and our first time even hearing of Rotem, although several young men in the audience were both quite familiar with him and quite excited to hear him play. He is, in fact, a very gifted guitarist, possessed of a clean, bell-like sound reminiscent of an early Pat Metheny and an ability to melodically improvise on the fly. If he wants to, he can become the new standard-bearer for jazz guitar, but if he's going to get there, he needs to ditch the other members of the trio he played with last night.
Not that they were bad musicians. The keyboardist was clearly more than capable and even provided synthesized bass lines for the songs, but the problem is that most of the pieces the trio performed were in fact songs and not compositions. Songs, as in lyrics and cringe-worthy singing by the keyboardist, and the conventional structure of most of the songs had the chorus returning and cutting Rotem's solos short just as he was starting to take off. Other than Rotem's playing, the songs sounded like the sort of typical jazz fusion you'd expect to hear in the lounge bar at an airport Hilton. Rotem needs and deserves a better context for his playing than these three- to four-minute pop songs.
The drummer was obviously proficient and ably handled fast-pace tempo changes and unusual time signatures. The problem was that he had no range to his playing - everything was unremittingly fast and loud, almost all snare and high tom, often deliberately overpowering the rest of the band. We've heard powerhouse drummers before who can lift the rest of the band up to higher levels of intensity; think Billy Cobham during the early years of jazz fusion. But a hot-dog drummer thinks that he's the star of the ensemble and that he has to dominate every second of every song, resulting in a wet blanket thrown over the interactions between the rest of the trio.
Check out how Rotem has to look back at the drummer around the 10-second mark to get him to back down for a moment so that he can get his guitar solo heard, and how only then can you finally appreciate the quality of Rotem's playing before the next percussive assault. Also note Rotem's unusual two-handed style of play.
The good news here is that Rotem Sivan is an extravagantly talented young guitarist, a fresh new voice when jazz needs it the most. A couple of those enthusiastic young fans in the audience told us that when they've seen Rotem in the past, he played solo without last night's trio, so there's hope that the band doesn't hold him back from the achievements of which he's capable and the recognition that he deserves.
But anyway, the headliners were Atlanta's Little Tybee, who fuse elements of jazz and jam-band psychedelia with their experimental approach to folk rock.
Little Tybee are an interesting hybrid of a band, one that you'd think wouldn't have even come together in the first place, much less remain more-or-less intact for some 10 years now. The band is fronted by singer and guitarist Brock Scott and his violinist wife, Nirvana Kelly, who together provide the core folk-rock sound of the band. Keyboardist Chris Case adds elements of jazz fusion and funk, and inventive guitarist Josh Martin, who plays an eight-string Ibanez electric, can take a band in almost any direction he chooses. Add to that Scott's somewhat meandering compositions, which often results in songs with several passages and distinct movements, and their penchant for selecting at least one unexpected song to cover during each set (last night's was Hall & Oates' I Can't Go For That) and you have a formula for a most interesting band.
When all the elements come together right, the effect can be rapturous, but Little Tybee performances are frankly hit-or-miss affairs. In the right setting, each instrumentalist can lead the band into various reveries and tangents, but when the mix isn't right, it can all get muddled and each contribution can get lost in the mix.
Last night's set was a little of both. While there were several standout moments, including one of Martin's "glitch-tapping" experiments on electric guitar and guest appearances by Rotem Sivan on a couple songs, other songs got eaten up by The Earl's sound system before they could become fully realized. The result was a set that would not at all have turned off a Little Tybee fan (and we consider ourselves fans) but would not likely have converted a skeptic.
But on the other hand, it was Saturday night in East Atlanta and the last show of a summer tour, so it was a party and everyone, both on stage and off, seemed to be having a good time. What more could you want?
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