A night of cutting-edge beats and melodies performed on the latest state-of-the-art gear awaits those who check out the Funky Nasty Futuristic Music happening Saturday night at dish in Cooper-Young. It's common to see deejays using laptop-based software like Serato at your local danceteria, but this night raises the ante with actual instrumental performances by the two acts -- DJ TJ and Onyx Ashanti -- on electronic wind controller and a variety of computerized beat-making gadgets. Sound interesting? Let me explain.
DJ TJ, based in Memphis, hooked up with Ashanti via a Yahoo member forum for users of the Electronic Wind Instrument, a device associated with jazz-fusion reedmen like Michael Brecker and Sypro Gyra's Beckenstein. (More than just a way for saxophone players to expand their sound palette, the EWI provides a full interface for a computer-using musician, just like a keyboard, a mouse, or a drum machine.) The two traded the obligatory MySpace invites, and found a few more online avenues in common, including the CO-OPR8 community dedicated to lovers of West London-style broken beat music. The latter message board brought Ashanti into contact with Colette Means, the deejay and promoter whom readers of this blog might know as DJ Funke. The three put their heads together, and TJ set up the date at dish. Ashanti happens to be a native of Iuka, Miss., and after stints in London (where he performed with the likes of Soul II Soul and Basement Jaxx, among others) and San Francisco, he was stopping back through Mississippi before heading to Berlin, Germany, to continue his musical journey.
"Before I left (San Francisco), I was doing a lot of my own stuff, street performer mostly. Then i get to London, and all of a sudden all of the crazy electronic stuff i was doing, people were getting it," Ashanti told me. "I've tried to recreate that energy in San Francisco, but it wasn't the same. It wasn't bad; it just wasn't what I felt I needed to create the style I've been working on."
Ashanti's free-wheeling live performances include hints of everything from latin grooves to the scattered rhythms of broken beat, with lush jazz chords underpinning his multitimbral melodies. The music is put together more or less on the fly, with Ashanti -- with the help of his laptop and other gadgets -- acting as his own band.
"I create loops at home, put them together live, then play on top of that," he told me. "Overseas, when I started playing with deejays, I concentrated on playing a singular element." But after a while, he told me, "The concept of playing with a deejay or playing along with myself felt very karaoke-ish -- it didn't feel like music to me. Last year I had a simple concept: I wanted to create everything live."
"At home, I practice salsa, I practice drum-and-bass, I practice these different styles so I have a setlist in my head that I played before that I can introduce to what I'm doing. but I vibe off the room to give me a direction," he told me. "I can create anything that i want. It becomes a question of figuring out ways to go to get different places."
For the technically inclined, Ashanti runs a Lenovo laptop, using his wind controller to activate his raw material from the Fruity Loops sequencing and virtual synth program, along with some sounds from the Reason suite. And then there's the helmet (see picture above).
"(The helmet is) sort of a necessity, and sort of a visual cue. ... I didn't want to look like 'Rhythm Nation,' with the whole in-ear monitor and the headset mic."
Ashanti found the tanker helmet at an army surplus shop in Camdentown, London. Eventually he tricked it out for studio-quality headphone monitoring as well as vocoder capabilities.
"You put on a helmet and play a wind controller, people gonna look at you crazy. ... It's very useful but also serves to put the music itself into a certain context, not only from the audience's point of view but also my point of view. It's very hard to not go off on a really outrageous tangent when you've got that thing on. I either get really self-conscious or really extroverted."
"(Audiences) see the horn, they think jazz, that they're gonna hear something pretty or something they are accustomed to -- some reference point they are going to grasp via the visuals. But the helmet serves to change that."
DJ TJ is on his own level of technological craziness, with tunes that tend more to the techy-house side of things. Although he doesn't rock the tanker helmet, he does activate his arsenal of software through a touchscreen interface called JazzMutant Lemur, which looks sort of like an old-school two player arcade video game. Geeky cool factor aside, Lemur presents plenty of practical advantages, such as not having to jerk around with a mouse and keyboard when you're triggering and manipulating samples, layering loops, playing your wind controller, and maybe sipping a pint of beer.
