Funk at the Junction
Posted by: Rowan in Personal Blog, tags: Concert, iMix, Jason Mraz, Journal, Music, Photos
Here comes the third and final part of my series of posts about 10 days of intensive gig attendance I undertook at the end of last month. (Part 1 here and part 2 here). My friend Sarah and I went to see Jason Mraz at The Junction in Cambridge. OK, so the title is a bit misleading – Jason’s music is not exactly funk. But there’s definitely elements of funk, and I find Jason Mraz hard to categorise.
You’ve probably never heard of Jason Mraz (at least if you’re reading in the UK), though he’s aiming to change that soon I think. For the uninitiated, he’s an avocado farmer in California. Wikipedia says it, so it must be true. More relevantly, they say that Mraz is an eclectic artist with multiple and varied stylistic influences, including pop, rock, folk, jazz, country, and hip hop. So there. The only real way to understand I suspect is to listen, so if you’re interested, scroll down to my iMix below.
I first listened to Jason Mraz in my bed at about 2am when I was living in York. I was having a minor attack of insomnia and decided I needed to listen to some music. I got up, and succumbed to the fact that both Amazon and iTunes had been recommending me the same album, Mr A-Z. A couple of minutes later (I love the immediacy of iTunes) I had it playing as I returned to bed. It did little for my insomnia, but I got a bit hooked. I later filled in the back catalogue, and this year I added his new album called We Sing. We Dance. We Steal Things. I fell in love with some of the newer tracks, which make heavier use of brass than most of his previous work, and though I’m still working on a decision as to whether it’s taken over as my favourite of his albums, it certainly contains my favourite track or two.
So anyway, on to the gig. Neither Sarah nor myself had seen Jason before, and Sarah was so excited when she saw it available that she bought a pair of tickets before even finding out whether I could go with her! I was only too pleased to make a small trek to Cambridge. Once there, the first excitement was before we even got in to the venue. Whilst queueing, some Americans called the Makepeace Brothers turned up and started to play for the people waiting. We were sat a couple of hundred metres away eating some dinner, and it was only as we wandered over to join the queue that we realised that Jason had actually come out and joined in the busking too! He clearly knew the other guys, but I was very impressed that he was only too happy to come out and spend his free time before the gig giving us all an extra 45mins or so of “unplugged” music. This, I figure, is a man who really does love his music, and the Makepeace Brothers were pretty good too.
Once inside, we had the oddest warmup act I’ve ever seen, and then the main event began. The Junction is a tiny venue, and couldn’t be more different to the previous gig I’d been to at Twickenham Stadium. The small crowd gave a really intimate feel, and we got even closer to the stage than at John Mayer, having only one person in front of us. Score! I was blown away by the energy of the generous 2 hour set. Jason and the whole band put everything into the performance, and even when they played songs that I didn’t consider favourites, I got more and more into the music. The brass I mentioned before made a very classy entrance, arriving in the safety walk between the audience and the stage, climbing up onto boxes of some sort and protruding their instruments out over the heads of the audience just in time to perfectly hit their cue. See the pictures – it was awesome.
I won’t drive you through the whole set list, but suffice to say it was fantastic, blending the old with plenty of the new and a few random extras (Cannabis College springs to mind). Sadly he didn’t play Coyotes, though I think the choir used on the album version would have struggled to fit on the stage, not to mention the fact that it would have been past the bedtime of the kids choir used at the very end. (Trust me, it works!) However, Dynamo of Volition was stunning, followed by my favourite track – Butterfly. The energy of the latter was incredible, and I still get excited now every time I hear that song.
You can see more pictures here (or here on Facebook). Below is my ‘top 10′ iTunes mix, showcasing some of my favourite Jason Mraz tracks if you want to explore his music. I only wish I wasn’t going to be in Sicily when he plays London again in September. Ah well, I guess it’s a good reason to have to miss it…