Mike kicked my ass the other day for not posting about the Thievery Corporation show we saw Wednesday night. We've developed a liking for a few of these "downtempo" groups, like Zero7, Massive Attack, Supreme Beings of Leisure along with Thievery Corporation. They tend to have original tunes and lyrics layered over a sometimes-dubbed, sometimes live rhythmic groove. Their forebears number Portishead and the French group Air. It exists, I believe, to create a chill atmosphere to accompany substance abuse more than to grab you by the lapels and stimulate your intellect.
Similarly, Thievery Corporation put 13 - 15 musicians on the stage, including two drummers, bass, a guy playing an electric sitar, 3-man horn section, 6 different vocalists and the two DC-area founders, Rob Garza and Eric Hilton. The show was at a new venue for us, Premier on First Avenue South, and it's nice - newly remodeled and spacious - unlike a lot of local music venues that seem to be merely real estate in transition, just waiting for the gentrification reaper. They played one long, generous set plus an encore, and we danced and sweat and went away happy.
I had my camera, but the battery was dead when I tried to use it, so I took a quick lesson in how to use my wife's camera phone (mine won't take pictures. They end up looking kinda arty, but that's solely due to the technical limitations of the device, and not to any talent on my part.
Thievery Corporation includes a lot of Middle Eastern/Indian influences, most apparent in their cd The Richest Man In Babylon. These were two guys from Istanbul who played wind instruments on one of the numbers, Facing East, from that album. One was a sorta double-reed like an English horn, the other a flute-like thing. They only appeared for that number. You wonder how they can travel with so many personnel and use them situationally. The show was $30 apiece, though...
6:46:38 AM 
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Perils of Caffeine in the Evening
