When: 30/03/2005
Where: Paradiso, Amsterdam
Rating: 2/5
US3 is probably most well-known for their 1994 hit "Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)" , a song that turned Hancock's 'Cantaloupe Island' into a groovy track ready to make the dancefloors of the nineties move and groove. Their first album, 'Hand on the torch' contained several more tracks, most heavily leaning on samples from the Blue Note stable, and was pretty solid.
Geoff Wilkinson, the founder of the group, decided to change the vocalists for every new album and one can wonder whether that's been a good choice.
The concert wasn't sold out, which, considering US3 had their last hit 11 years ago, wasn't too odd. The band started of with a down-tempo track from the new album which most of the crowd didn't seem to familiar with. They followed it up with 2 other new tracks, which, again, didn't drive the audience wild. The looks on some of the artists faces seemed to suggest they expected otherwise.
It wasn't until they kicked in the 1994 track "I got it going on" that the crowd went wild. You'd expect a band would act upon such a huge difference in crowd response, but instead of playing more old stuff, they played mostly tracks from their new album. I can imagine it must be frustrating when your crowd mostly wants to hear songs you made over 10 years ago, but if that's what they want, perhaps you should give it to them instead of having them rather bored for larger parts of the evening.
Another big downside was that there was no live percussion. All beats seamed to come from Wilkinson's powerbook, which doesn't work too well for live jazz sounds. The bass and horn sections were played live and adequately, though nothing too spectacular happened. For a while I thought the problem was that the music is generally pretty laid back, but since I've got three albums, I know they've got some pretty bouncy tracks too, which they unfortunately failed to play.
I had high hopes of this and am sorry to say it's actually at the bottom list of concerts I visited.