We want the funk. Gotta have the funk.
P-Funk were in town. To be honest, I have never heard of P-Funk or George Clinton or Parliament or Funkadelic a week before. A friend of mine introduced me to their music a week back and and it was pretty easy to get hooked to some of their rhythms. Kind of interesting that the music is dated 20-30 years but still sounds pretty fresh. It is easy to pick out some Motown influences in their music but they also had enough neat melodies and rhythm. Of course some songs were down right weird. But that is cool.
So I decided to go down to the concert and we got the cheapest tickets possible. That meant the seats were really far in the balcony (I recalled pat metheny’s concert and decided to bring my bino’s too). However, as Singapore turned out to be far less funky than imagined, the concert hall was less than half full. And we got upgraded to much better seats.
They played a number of cool tracks and padded it with great improv on guitar and sax. The band was pretty polarized with some really old chaps (George Clinton is almost 70, Garry Shider is 60+ and wears a diaper and only a diaper. Really) and some very young fellers (Greg Thomas – Sax, the guitarists were pretty young too). But the band held together pretty darn well and the energy was pretty high throughout. I am sore after screaming, jumping and dancing.
Acoustics were pretty high standard as usual (esplanade is great) but the concert hall is probably not the best place to have a funk concert. What is needed is probably an outdoor venue with lots of beer. Well I suppose it is not common to have funk bands visiting Singapore and I suppose I should be glad instead of finding fault with the venue. But even then, it would have been good to have more space to groove with the music. Oh well.
As for the bino, it was pretty useful to get a close up view of the band and some of the dancing girls too 
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