As we noted last Sunday, this is Yusef Komunyakaa week over at “the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival 2014” and as part of the celebrations, the Tomas Doncker Band played the Doncker- Komunyakaa written and composed Big Apple Blues at NJ Pac Friday afternoon.
I love seeing the Doncker Band with folks who don’t know em, the audience sits around expecting something a little staid and respectable and the band wallops em right on their ass. Always fun but never as much fun as this afternoons show: surrounded by students who had spent the day in the admittedly intellectually stimulating environments of a Poetry slam dunk, and sitting for ten minutes of Yusef himself reading two small poems, opening with “Requiem” with its “the Crescent City was already shook down to her pilings” line recalling the duo’s first collaboration the Mercy Suite, they didn’t know what they were getting themselves into.
Yusef’s reading was beautiful stuff but it wasn’t the Doncker Band who (really, I swear this is true, I was sitting adjacent to two young girls dancing in their seats and I was behind another young girl who halfway through the set started sketching Tomas) were absolutely phenomenal. The vibe was magical, it was like watching a preacher converting people to Christianity, Doncker was converting people to the blues and you could see the kids come alive, perk up, smile, like they couldn’t believe how great it was. Like they were being changed.
Opening with the same two songs the album opened with, the cymbal crashing intro to ”Big Apple Blues” and soon after moving into a song… the first time I heard it was at the Doncker Band’s Midnight Blue Note show last summer, and it floored me then, the Stones-y “Can’t Say No” and it was better during thisset. Tomas noted how the band really love playing the song and David Barnes, who you think of as a Willie “Big Eyes” Smith powerharp player was pure melody, you can almost see him pick out the notes on his harp. The song is a show stopper and in time they will place it closer to the end of the set.
Seeing these songs live you feel like hugging Yusef, these words are so thrilling, so well constructed, living in his belly as Yusef put it, and Doncker never falters, there seems to be no thought process, everything is instinct as these towering words rush at us.
There was a problem, the band pushed “The New Day”, perhaps the greatest song the duo have ever written, out of the third spot it holds on the album undoubtedly because Tomas wanted to send us home with it, instead they ran out of time and we didn’t get it: now I am left to imagine the reaction to the singer warning us to “Sinner, come home to Jesus”. Instead of “The New Day” Tomas showed off his chops as a guitarist on “At The Midnight Hour” (“do you get it?” Yusef asked Tomas after sending him the words. Then they discussed it for two days). It was Doncker’s second best performance of the afternoon, his best was “Ground Zero” a song they are still feeling out and still just absolutely remarkable. It feels like it will be a Doncker Band song for a long while, it is too strong not to be, the emotions run too deep and Tomas grasps it and tears its head off.
The entire band does. This band is just so hot right now, in the confines of a Poetry seminar they rip the roof off.
Man, what a great set. What it missed in length (not an hour) and what it missed in a slacking off towards the end by not swarming “The New Day” it gained in a fresh young audience and an audience who loved them for reminding everybody that neither poetry nor the blues is dead art forms: this is living breathing vibrant stuff.
Grade: A-.
