Sonny Fortune/Rashied Ali @ the Jazz Bakery on Saturday; Beastie Boys @ Madison Square Garden on DVD (Awesome, I … shot that!). Sonny Fortune (Sax) and Rashied Ali (drums), a duo, started to play and didn’t stop for about one hour. Then, Sonny had to take a break. I never saw someone playing sax for one hour without interruption, and I probably will never see that again. It reminded me Elvin Jones/Cecil Taylor @ Blue Note New York a few years ago: they started to play and didn’t stop…until they had to because the second set to follow. Live experience you never forget. And no recording can capture it, there is too much emotion and physical dedication you can’t digitalize. Most recordings of live sets I know can’t compete, they are over revised, too much cleaning, editing. Jazz is too spontaneous for that, with all the failures and inconsistencies. The Beastie Boys on the other hand: only the way they created there DVD makes the difference. Some fifty people in the audience were stuffed with a camera to record the show, the material was used for a DVD. The music is electronic, digital and so very easy to compile with the footage of the camcorders. It’s another approach taking full advantage of digitalization. I was surprised by the wide facetted music: from combo band setting to DJ Rap. I thought it makes all the difference to the everyday chart pop-ups: the creativity and the sensibility for what you’re doing. Most bands are produced to what people want to hear (or better what producers think people want to hear). The beastie boys do whatever they want, like it or not.

All I thought about this: there is this creativity on both sides, and it should stay that way. As it doesn’t make sense to digitalize Sonny Fortune/Rashied Ali, it doesn’t make sense to unplug the music of the beastie boys.