Being completely unfamiliar with the band Shawn Lee’s Ping Pong Orchestra, I thought it was weird I knew one of their song ‘Kiss the Sky’ featured on their myspace page. I was curious because they were performing at Amoeba this afternoon.
They were playing to promote Shawn Lee’s recently released album ‘Sing a Song’, from which they played a few tracks, most of them instrumentals, largely infused by jazz, soul, funk, borderline psychedelic beats, and inspiring a real cinematic ambient feeling.
Yes, you want to see pictures, movies when they play, and this is not very extraordinary because many of them have been used in movies and series. If Shawn Lee is a relatively unknown name to the public, his music is certainly not ignored by movie and TV series producers: it is featured in ‘Ocean’s Thirteen’, ‘The Break Up’, ‘Confessions of a Shopaholic’, ‘CSI Miami’, ‘Lost’, ‘Desperate Housewives’, ’Nip Tuck’, ‘Ugly Betty’, ‘Eastbound and Down’… to name only a few. Wow, Hollywood sure knows how to exploit a mine!
The sound which always borrows from jazz, is spacey, atmospheric, and for some tracks, the melody seems to be built around the bass line with all the sounds of the other instruments gravitating around it. And there are a lot of these instruments, beside Lee there were 6 musicians playing two guitars, a bass, drums, diverse percussion instruments, a flute, a saxophone, two keyboards.
The tunes are repetitive, but on purpose, they seem to compose a melody and dig around it, elaborating more and more without really changing the level of execution, and the only thing that surprised me was the relative shortness of the tracks, because the way they are constructed, around their hypnotic sound, they could go on for hours.
On the album ‘Sing a song’, there are many vocalists, but last night Lee performed the vocals and smoothly and playfully went from bass, to guitar to drums, showing his multi-instrumentalist talents.
They closed the set with ‘Kiss the sky’ (sang by Nino Moschella’s high pitched-soul voice on the single), which partially stand out from the rest because of the dramatic vocals surfing the heavy melody and the lightly executed keyboard tune in the background.
On his myspace Shawn Lee describes his sound as ‘Stevie Wonder sitting in with The Beach Boys circa 1974 produced by Phil Spector with Earl Palmer on drums and Herbie Flowers on bass! Ennio Morricone gone FUNKY!!!!’
I guess you can go with crazy description like this one, and it may be because Shawn Lee is himself Lebanese-American Indian-Irish-American that he likes composite depiction, but this is essentially atmospheric soul music completely suited for all these Hollywood series.
And I know where I had heard ‘Kiss the sky’, it was in the HBO series ‘Eastbound and Down’! But, curiously, even then, it already had a feeling of deja-heard.
Let’s listen to it again: