RayL wrote:Dennis Coffey (X-Motown Funk Brother but here playing harsh, distorted, stuff). Coffey was not my cup of tea and Jim and Spence felt the same way
Ray,
You are far too kind.
Dennis Coffey's contributions to that concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on his ebony-finished Gibson ES-355 were worthy of an award - from Private Eye's "Pseud's Corner".
Interested members can read about him here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Coffey.
On Monday, there was absolutely no attempt at melody, structure or even harmony of any sort beyond basic pentatonic noodling over a single chord drone with no development whatever. The supporting band - and what a superb band they were - were reduced to beating out a raucous monotone, which felt as though it went on for much longer than the five or six minutes that each of the three or four separate episodes of Coffey's Cacophony actually occupied.
I know only too well (remembering with a shudder my own interest in "free jazz" in the late sixties) that audience members can be easily intimidated into thinking that they are the only ones present who don't understand a "challenging" performance, with the result that they are tempted to present an over-enthusiastic response. Hans Christian Anderson wrote a story about that tendency. There were obviously many such victims in the audience that night, whereas those who could see the emperor's nudity for what it was gave no public reaction beyond the demands of basic politeness.
I hope I'm not making him sound too good.
No matter what glories he may have achieved in the studios of Detroit (about which I confess that I know very little), he was rubbish on Monday.
JN
(who felt cheated)