Roland: Concert Season has started again, and this time I was off to Switzerland (Pratteln just across the border on the South side of river Rhine) to see Neal Morse Band presenting their latest album "The Grand Experiment". The venue Z7 was very nice, but also very drafty due to the fact that most of the listeners appeared to be smokers, and almost constantly someone was leaving from or returning into the building, leaving the door open for seconds while the very cool outside air vented though the hall. Brrr.
Good thing that the music heated up fast. The band is full of fantastic musicians (Mike Portnoy has been voted #10 best rock drummer ever), and they tended to play shorter songs than usual (Morse generally writes lots of 'epics' with length between 10 and 40 minutes). Nice mixture of rock and some quieter moments. The final song of the regular set saw them really showing off by switching instruments - twice! The drummer started playing bass, Morse hit the drums, the guitarist soloed on the keyboard and the keyboarder played the guitar. Then the guitarist played a drum solo, and the bass player managed to do a solo on guitar and keyboard at the same time! I hate them...
Luckily the concert ended after only 2:20h (we watched the band in Seattle once playing 3:30h) so I was able to get home by 1 AM in the morning. Still getting up the next morning was no feat!
Coming up: Irish Folk in our hometown, Steven Wilson in Pratteln, a Jazz festival in Rottweil, Camel at the Loreley, Big Big Train in London... It is going to be a busy year!
A busy concert year. You are better than I at handling crowds.
ReplyDeleteThat was not really a crowd :-) Maybe 300, max 400 people. You sometimes wonder how these real musicians manage to live from their music. And why the Justin Biebers of this world get all the fame...
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