The senior citizens of funk delivered the dankest grooves on Friday at the with the help of an energetic 49-year-old whippersnapper on keys.
Founding members of the seminal New Orleans funk outfit – bassist George Porter Jr., guitarist Leo Nocentelli and drummer Zigaboo Modeliste – burnished their timeless funk with the help of Phish keyman Page McConnell. The sold out venue throbbed with sweaty revelers as rooted through funk’s most definitive catalogue.
The “Fire on the Bayou” opener ignited the scene, with dancers crinkling their noses as the swampy ooze of Porter’s pungent bass saturated the stage. McConnell, whose nearly 30-year-old Phish has grown to define the jam sound not unlike the Meters rendered the funk genre, eased into the master’s seat on Friday. The Meters keyboardist Art Neville wasn’t in the house, but McConnell’s gave plenty of nods to Papa Funk, patiently percolating his buoyant keys through the decades-old vibrations stirred by funk’s monarchal duo of Modeliste and Porter.
The “Cissy Strut” – “Cardova” jamming revealed McConnell’s relaxed, subtle style that snuck up on listeners focusing on, say, Modeliste’s dominance on the skins or Porter’s persuasive chord progressions.
Modeliste grabbed the show in the bombastic “Africa.” Porter drew from his own Runnin’ Pardners band with “The Dragon,” which seemingly inspired McConnell, who followed with a show highlight, raging piano jam in “Hey Pocky Way.”
Nocentelli tended to stand alone. His frequent and maybe too indulgent jams saw Porter backing nearly offstage while McConnell plinked rudimentary notes. But then Nocentelli has never been one to shy from the spotlight, with gargantuan guitar licks. Thing was, on Friday at least, he was not on point, which made his overdone guitar jamming often clumsy and superfluous.
Porter and Modeliste easily re-ignited a crowd that lurched through Nocentelli’s riffs, with a fiery “(The World Is a Bit Under the Weather) Doodle-Oop” and a syrupy, multi-grooved “It Ain’t No Use,” the latter of which saw Nocentelli more subtly weave his riffs with Porter’s thunder.
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