Venzuelan dance fusion band Los Amigos Invisibles performed the best opening 20 minutes of music I’ve heard this year and if that sounds like faint praise it ain’t: remember it’s “LIVE and recorded” and I go to many, many, many shows.
This is heavy duty, industrial strength dance. Completely undeniable, Los Amisogs rocked the rafters down with two drummers, congos and a great lead singer and everything, everything built around an extended powerhouse jam seguing from one song to next without a break, indee, with only a revolving drum line to show the perforations.
Everything in this first twenty minutes is built around the bass line: even the horns, which blast out from time to time, are at servive of the bass. This is effortlessly superior dance music, so superior you have to concentrate in not dancing in order to figure out that these are compless rhythms. This is dance as propagated by a Luca Venezia but it is not programmed dance. It stands live and it moves mountains.
“Hello to my North American friends.” Natalia Lafourcade shouts in Spanish to a fairly approving audience before Los Amigos Invisbles set. Natalia is a petite young woman, with a big guitar, a voice like a bird chirping, and a sound .. like a bird chirping.
Apparently a big star in Mexico, over here she is just plain strange. Her half hour set is low key pop tunes who, yeah I know, main difference is the releance on rhythm in ways rock doesn’t. Her big hit comes and go and the playbill comparison to Tori Amos and Bjork sounds a little nonsensicle.
Since I don’t know her material and don’t speak Spanish, I find it hard to connect but I do appreciate its obtuse otherness and can just about dig why “Casa” (“home” she translates -thanks Natalia) was a hit.
The last song of the set, with Natalia behind keyboards, is different though. A prettified but difficult mood piece with an extended coda, finally the experimentation mentioned makes a bit more sense. Maybe Natalia checked out her audience and decided now was the time to be listener friendly.
Back at the Los Amigos Invisibles set, I am ready to annoint em dance gods: “I like to move it, move it” but the second song is a jazz-dance fusion and while it is OK if you like jazz-fusion I guess but it is a real come down. Summerstage is packed out (they stop letting people in) and everybody who can move is dancing.
And they recover, a funk work out featuring quotes from Funkedelia and Sly Stone is the real dance and a Merengue swing out dancer reminds you that, after all, they are Venezuelan. There is even a disco work out which sounds like Chic joined a South American dance band (a little redundant but you get the concept).
So, a really good set but that first 20 minutes, guys. Something really special.