Over the last week and a half, I’ve been working on a video for work. Long story short – we’re launching a new product with a specific target audience, so we’re capturing the reactions of these people as we introduce it to them.

For this video – the first of its series – we went to a local event here in Amsterdam called De Parade. The Parade is a strange name for this event, because it’s really more like a carnival. Sort of. There are merry-go-rounds and food, but no rides. Instead, the rides are replaced by tents and stages where various theatrical performances of all kinds are held.

So we went to the Parade to capture the atmosphere, test out our product and share it with people there in our target group. After all the shooting I sat down to cut up the footage and start to piece together the video. I took the sound from a shot of the merry-go-round to lay a bed of background tone to the video. The clip had some music underneath it, so I looped a section to provide not only crowd noises but background music for the video.

I started to run into a few auditory issues with the video as I was cutting up one of our interviews with a girl who worked at the Parade. Unfortunately, we recorded our interview with her near some speaker that was blaring music in the background. When I placed her clips over the bed of sound and music I had created, the competing songs obviously clashed with each other.

Due to the length of the interview, there were actually two different songs heard behind clips of our interview subject that we wanted to use. One was “I Need A Dollar” by Aloe Blacc, and the other was “Sex on Fire” by Kings of Leon. I tried to use some audio filters to pull the voice out against the background noise, but it wasn’t working quite right so I had to work around it.

Later on, as I neared completion of the video, I had second thoughts about the looped crowd and music I had underneath the video and decided to ditch it. I used a different, longer clip for crowd sounds and used some EQ filters to keep out any subtle music that could be heard. I decided I wanted to use a clean track of studio music in combination with the crowd noise as my background, but I needed to find a song.

First I thought about finding the song that was playing in my original loop, so I used Shazam to figure out what it was. Turns out it was “The Clapping Song” by Shirley Ellis – a song that, at this point, had started to drive me nuts because of the loop I had created. I ditched that idea and brainstormed other music ideas. In another clip of the same merry-go-round, there was a different song playing that I liked as well. It sounded like some soul/Motown group from the same era as the Shirley Ellis song, so again I used Shazam to find it.

The song was “King of the Rodeo” by The Bamboos. I had never heard of them, and based on a quick glance at the album art I assumed they were an older group. After listening to the song a few times, I realized it was more modern, and a Wikipedia search turned up the page for the Australian funk band The Bamboos.

I liked the song right away and it worked perfectly with the video, so it made it into the final cut that was eventually shared with a small group of people testing our new product. As it turns out, the song is actually a cover of a tune by Kings of Leon, the same group that plagued one of the interviews with conflicting sound. A strange coincidence.

The Bamboos are mainly an instrumental ensemble who bring in different vocalists from time to time. The singer on this tune was Megan Washington, a fellow Australian artist. The song is from 2008, and since then the group has brought on a more permanent vocalist. At least that’s what I can tell from browsing their Wikipedia page. I’ve had a listen to their most recent album, “4″ and like some of the songs. Some are just instrumental soul/funk grooves, which I appreciate.

So now I’ve discovered an Australian funk/soul group. Wasn’t expecting that. The song “King of the Rodeo” is a good one, but I may be a bit tired of it right now having used it in editing the video, forcing me to listening to it over and over. But I think in the future when I hear this song, I will be reminded of this fun project I am currently involved in at work and the good times had at De Parade in Amsterdam.

Again, after getting home very late and passing out as the sun came up, I rolled out of bed and down to the train station to get back to the festival. My first stop was one of the smaller indoor venues to see a group that seemed interesting from their description. Hidden Orchestra is an electronic jazz group from Edinburgh that combines lots of cool sounds with some heavy guitar, winds, strings and dual drum kits. I wasn’t allowed to photograph their performance, but the image at the top of this post is of the stage before they began.

I’m not real big on electronic music, but like any genre, I have artists I enjoy. In this category, I do enjoy the French group Air, and Hidden Orchestra was sort of like Air but a bit harder and more intense. The pieces were lyric free and sample/riff-driven and seemed to have some deep artistic heartbeat behind them, almost like the group took itself a bit too seriously. But still, I found some of their tunes enjoyable before I took off. A good example of a tune I found myself bobbing my head to is “Dust”.

I skipped out of that room after a half-hour or so to go catch a bit of music from Dr. John & the Lower 911, an amazing group from New Orleans. I’ve largely become familiar with Dr. John by simply watching the HBO series Treme, so it was pretty cool to catch a bit of his set. I snapped some photos while he played, but I was just stopping by before heading into Nile for the first big act of the day.

I can’t say I was that familiar with Raphael Saadiq before the festival, but I knew I wanted to see him. I had heard enough of his stuff to know I wanted to check him out in person, and I say it all came out as a push. I wasn’t blown away and won over by his performance, but he has a few catchy tunes and his general style is pretty cool. However, it seemed like every other song he performed was a heartfelt love ballad that had the ladies swooning. I’d rather hear the stuff with a good beat, so his show was a bit of a wash for me. I did enjoy “Heart Attack” though. Saadiq sounds like a young Stevie Wonder. Just sayin.

Next I switched halls to see Raul Midón and Richard Bona. I first discovered Midón several years ago when he made his TV debut on the Dave Letterman show. That performance, and the song “State of Mind” pretty well summarizes his peculiar style. Midón is a blind man who plays acoustic guitar very unconventionally by slapping his hands around the strings to create new sounds and rhythms. Oh and he sings and imitates trumpet sounds while doing it. He’s an amazing talent.

I didn’t know who Richard Bona was, but he’s apparently a badass bass player who, when teamed with Midón, brews up some funky music. Here’s a video of one the songs they performed, “O Sen Sen,” which has a Latin feel to it. I can’t remember if I heard this tune of if I had left already. One thing I noticed while watching the pair play and taking photos was that by this point in the festival my feet were aching incredibly. Standing for hours at a time three days in a row was not being received well by my feet, and my shoes weren’t helping.

That’s necessary to set up what happened next. Midón and Bona were scheduled to play until 8:15, but I wanted to get a good spot to see the next act on my schedule, which started at 8:45. I know I had to leave early to get a good spot, and so around 7:30 I left and I did pretty well. I was center stage about a dozen people from the front. Not bad, but it was packed pretty tight, so it was pretty uncomfortable, especially with the aching feet. I stood in that spot for about 75 minutes waiting for the next act while Tom Jones played on the next stage over. So I got to see Tom Jones (who performed an awesome rendition of “You Can Leave Your Hat On”), but he wasn’t who I was waiting for.

After what seemed like an eternity, Snoop Dogg took over the stage and proceeded to tear the roof off of the place. It was unreal. It was probably one of the whitest audiences he’d ever played for, but it was a blast. The set featured all of the hits from “Doggystyle” and I managed to get some good shots amongst the mayhem in the crowd.

It was an amazing show. Snoop had a dog mascot with him on stage, lit up a joint, held a moment of silence for Nate Dogg, and of course was joined by dogpound members and his numerous sexy dancers. Like I said, it was amazing. Dare I say, legendary.

Snoop was by far the best act I saw at the entire festival, but that wasn’t the finale of the final day. After Snoop, I scooted out of the then packed hall to go see a separate show for which I had to separately buy tickets. It was a nice way to calm down after the adrenaline of Snoop, and the room had seats. It was the same place I saw the Clayton Hamilton Jazz Orchestra two nights earlier, but this time some true jazz legends were taking the stage.

To put a pretty little bow on the festival weekend, I had tickets to see Herbie Hancock & Wayne Shorter pay tribute to Miles Davis with some other great musicians. It’s not everyday something special like this happens, so I felt very fortunate to be able to see it. Hancock on the piano and keyboards, Shorter on the sax and the rest of the group ripped through some straight ahead bop tunes like nobody’s business. It was incredible and a great way to end the festival.

After three days, a pair of sore feet, roughly 20 acts seen and almost 300 miles travelled by train, I can say I had one of the best weekends of my life down in Rotterdam basking in the music of the North Sea Jazz Fest. It was well worth the cost of admission.

When we last left off, I had finally made it back to my bed in Amsterdam around 4am after leaving Rotterdam around 1:30. The first group I wanted to see on Day 2 started at 4:30 in the afternoon, so I pretty much rolled out of bed around noon and went back to Central Station to get down to Rotterdam by then.

The 4:30 act I wanted to see was the Universtiy of Kentucky Jazz Ensemble. Personally, I had no reason to see them other than the fact that a friend of mine was once a music student at UK and recommended I go check them out and try to say hey to the drummer if I could. I checked them out, and they were great. I wasn’t blown away, but they clearly deserved to make the trans-Atlantic trip to play at the festival. Unfortunately the set up was such that I couldn’t flag down a member of the group to say hello, but I had better acts to get to anyhow.

The first big name of the day that I was psyched to see was Sergio Mendes. I can’t honestly say that I was a Sergio Mendes fan before the jazz fest, but I had been familiar with some of his more popular hits with Brasil 66. I even arranged “Mais Que Nada” for steel band back in college (but, like many of my arrangements, it was more for my own practice than to actually perform), and sure enough they played that tune. Unfortunately, Mendes recently collaborated with the Black Eyed Peas on the song (which, in my opinion, butchered the tune with bullshit BEP watermark lyrics and over-simplified rhythms) and this was the version he chose to perform with a substitute hiphop artist. Thankfully, many of the self-refferential BEP lines were removed.

I managed to get another good spot for this concert, which was held (if you remember from my Day 1 post) on one of the two large stages in the Nile hall. I was maybe a dozen people from the stage directly in front of where Mendes was perched at the ivories. To the right were three female vocalists and everything was backed by standard percussion/bass/guitar fare. So, as I admitted before, I didn’t know most of the songs, but I enjoyed for their Brazilian samba grooves and catchy lyric hooks. It’s just the kind of music that’s inherently danceable and easy to pick up quickly. It wasn’t until I passed a booth selling music from the festival and saw the cool artwork on an apparently new Mendes release that inspired me to hunt down the songs I had heard. I think “Emorio” from the Bon Tempo album is a new favorite of mine from Mendes.

There is one other thing I must mention from his performance. I know a friend of mine who practices capoeira enjoys Mendes’ music (he, too, is a percussionist) and knew he was jealous I was seeing him perform. But to pour salt on the wound, during one tune the auxiliary percussionist came to the front of the stage to perform capoeira moves and play pandero. It was great to see yet another musical legend like Mendes still grooving away at his age.

Next I simply shuffled over to the other Nile stage to get a good spot for Ben l’Oncle Soul. In planning my weekend at the festival, I had decided to look into Ben simply because the schedule was a bit dry at this point in the day and he seemed interesting. The Frenchman (whose name means “Uncle Ben’s Soul”) is described as a gospel/soul/funk/blues/hiphop mix who grew up listening to Marvin Gaye and Ray Charles. This is all apparent in his songs, and in his stylistic covers of hit songs like Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl” and the Spice Girls’ “Say You’ll Be There”. His debut album of original tunes is pretty good too, and I have to say my favorite tune is “Soulman”.

Again, I managed a pretty good spot to watch this unique talent perform. In the weeks leading up to the show, I grew to enjoy his music and knew the lyrics (even the French ones) to a few of his songs. He brought a lot of energy to the show, which had him sweating through his shirt as he ran around, and even out into the audience (and right by me). He played lots of the songs I had grown to enjoy, his well-known covers, and even a few new ones that I can’t remember. He seemed to enjoy hyping up the crowd by either running into the audience and dancing, vamping on the end of a tune for several minutes at varying energy levels, or even sitting down at the keyboard. I was surprised at the number of young girls in the crowd who knew all of his lyrics – I’ve never known a soul singer with a Motown flair to have that kind of following. Right on.

After that I hit a lull in my Saturday schedule and decided to take it easy on the risers in the back of the Nile hall. The next artist up in the hall was Chaka Khan – not someone I was terribly psyched to see but watched for a bit anyhow. She blew through some tunes, eventually singing the only one I cared about, “Ain’t Nobody” and after I snapped a few pictures of the screen she was on, I bailed to go walk around the festival grounds for a bit. I perused the food and beer tents, and devoured a traditional Dutch pancake (pannekoeken) filled with chocolate syrup and doused in powdered sugar. Yum.

I made my way back around to Nile in time to, again, get a decent spot to see the next big name on the ticket: Seal. Seal is one of those artists that I am not an avid follower of, but I liked his hits, so when the opportunity came to see him I said, “sure, why not?” Unlike most artists at the show, he actually went to the trouble to assemble a stage set and perform his show full-out. He, thankfully, performed some covers, including “It’s A Man’s World” and “Knock on Wood”, so I wasn’t completely lost. Eventually, of course, he performed “Kiss From A Rose” and “Crazy”, which were cool to see live. I had a lot of fun photographing Seal as he moved around on stage. The lighting was just right to get some pretty cool shots. One thing I found from taking pictures at the Jazz Fest was getting shots of fans as they snap photos and take videos with their phones and cameras with LCDs on them, like this shot of Seal performing.

He was cool to see, but I was actually more excited to see another group I had recently grew to enjoy since finding their name on the show schedule. Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue is a high-energy group that combines New Orleans brass sounds with hiphop, funk and soul sounds to make a really unique blend. It’s mostly instrumental, and has heavy, head-bobbing beats. I got a great spot just a few feet from the stage in the small Congo room where I saw Robert Randolph the night before.

Trombone Shorty is a virtuoso trombone and trumpet player and his band of horns, guitar, bass and percussion was a blast. There’s even a few videos of the group’s performance at NSFJ up on YouTube, so check those out to see just was I was a few feet from. I managed to get some great of shots of Shorty and his band thanks to my close proximity to the stage. They are really entertaining to watch and their music is fun – I highly recommend checking them out if you enjoy good things.

After that, it was 1am so I hurried over to Rotterdam Centraal, caught the train back to Amsterdam and rode the night bus back to my place.

And that was Day 2.

I hopped on a train from Amsterdam Centraal after work on Friday and made it down to Rotterdam and to the Ahoy (an arena and conference center) in time to snag a pretty decent spot for the first act I wanted to see: Paul Simon. I’ve never been a really strong fan of Paul Simon, but over the years I’ve enjoyed his hits and I can appreciate the place he holds in music history. The man is a legend, and an amazing songwriter. My intrest in his music piqued when I fell in love with The Obvious Child, a song which I performed as a member of the ASU Pan Devils Steel Band in college. Simon was the perfect way to kick off the weekend for me. He was just one of many legendary musicians I would get the chance to see perform from just a few feet away.

The entire festival was held in a series of rooms and halls, and simon played in “Nile,” the largest of the rooms. Nile was basically a giant hangar like structure featuring two large stages. One stage would tear down and set up the next act while an artist played on the other stage, so there was hardly any time without music in Nile. Seating lined the sides and far back of the space and in the middle was open standing room. I managed to get there early enough to be fairly close to the stage, maybe 30 people back, and to the right. Watching Paul Simon perform from maybe 20 yards away was amazing, and he played familiar songs: Graceland, 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover, The Boy in the Bubble, etc. But my night would not be complete without hearing The Obvious Child, and sure enough, he played it. It was a great thrill to hear such an amazing song from a living musical legend. And that was the first concert of the entire weekend. Like I said, an amazing way to get started.

As if to perfectly contrast a living legend, I left Nile and headed inside into the arena space to see a relatively new artist: Janelle Monáe. The arena space was smaller than Nile, featuring just one stage and having rings of seating around a main stranding room floor space. I left Paul Simon a bit early to grab a good spot and was maybe 5 people back from the stage and to the left for Janelle Monáe. She did something that very few artists did all weekend: she put on an entire stage show. Most simply came out and played their set, but she insisted on maintaining her stage production. Everything on stage was black and white, including costumes for the backup singers and small 4-person orchestra. A man in a large top hat came on stage to welcome us to the “Emotion Picture,” and soon three cloaked figures were on stage as the musicians began Suite II Overture, the opening track on her album “Archandroid”. The album plays like a concept album, as songs blend from one to the other in a continuous stream of music – and that’s exactly how she performed them.

She went straight through Dance or Die, Faster, Locked Inside and Sir Greendown before mixing things up. Her babyface looks, spiraling beehive hairdo, unique style and energetic performance had the audience grooving, and she took us all along with her as she suddenly swooped into covers. She slyly transitioned into Stevie Wonder’s Cherie Amour and then picked up the pace with The Jackson 5′s I Want You Back before getting her girl power on with No Doubt’s Just a Girl. She made her way back to “Archandroid”, performing Cold War and her hit Tight Rope back to back. At this point I headed out of the arena as she began Come Alive, during which she apparently crowd surfed. Perhaps I missed my chance to grab me some Janelle Monáe. Oh well.

I quickly shuffled over Amazon, a smaller stage with seating in a tent outside between the arena and hangar area. In this case, the fact that I was venturing out to the festival on my own came in handy as I was able to snag a single empty seat in the front row. This was a great stroke of luck because I was now seated front-row and nearly center for an act I was highly anticipating: Robert Randolph and the Family Band. I first discovered Robert Randolph when I saw him perform with Dave Matthews Band at one of their shows in Phoenix some years back. Randolph plays the pedal steel and his group throws down on a mix of funk, soul, blues, gospel and jam music. It’s an absolutely amazing sound, and I highly recommend him if you enjoy those genres.

He played some songs I’m familiar with off his most recent album, “Walk This Road,” including Travelling Shoes, Back to the Wall and Shot of Love. I’m fairly certain he played some covers as well, but they are escaping me at this point. There’s a video from the festival of Robert Randolph’s performance of Voodoo Chile online, as well as this video of the same song shot by a fan in the audience. In that last one you can see me bobbing my head in the front row (I’m directly to the right of the shiny-domed bald guy next to me.) As you can see, eventually people started filtering infront of the first row of seats to dance and jam out. It was a great time.

I stayed until the end of Robert Randolph’s performance, mostly because he was tearing the roof off of the small tent they put him in, but also because I wasn’t terribly invested in the next act I saw: Alain Clark. There was a lull in the overall event schedule, so I decided to see Clark, who is a Dutch pop vocalist. I looked into his music and found a handful of his songs to be pretty catchy, but such is pop music – it’s designed that way. I mentioned to a co-worker that I was going to catch part of his set and she seemed disgusted by the notion, and she was probably justified to feel that way.

Clark may be one of the few artists who I enjoy more on an album that I do live in concert. He seemed to be going page-by-page through the pop concert checklist and repeating it ten-fold. Maybe he was trying to fill time, but every song went on too long with call-and-response chants with the audience, long instrumental breakdowns, clapping and encouraging the audience to sing large chunks of the chorus. It was getting kind of old. I swear, if he pointed that mic toward the audience one more time I was going to strangle him with it. I would have rather he filled that time with covers if he didn’t have enough songs to fill the space (which seems ridiculous since he has two full length albums out). Songs I remember hearing include This Ain’t Gonna Work, Fell in Love and Father & Friend, a sappy duet with his dad, who he brought on stage at the show. Not being very well-versed in Dutch music culture, I assumed that father Clark was a well known singer who’s son had followed in his footsteps. Nope, his claim to fame is being Alain Clark’s dad. And singing a super sappy duet with him. Ultimately, it was okay, but like I said, it felt like he was trying to hard to get the audience involved. We don’t have that kind of energy for every song, especially at a three-day festival.

After that let down, I moved on into the indoor conference hall area to finish out the first day with some real jazz: The Clayton Hamilton Jazz Orchestra. This was an old school classic jazz orchestra, complete with the custom music stands in front the saxophones. This was a more tame performance hall, complete with chairs and a rear grandstand. I, again, managed to nab a seat in the front because I was a single. They played mostly tunes I hadn’t heard before, but most of the older folks in the hall seemed to recognize them.

At one point a popular Dutch jazz singer, Trijntje Oosterhuis, took the stage and blew us away with Night and Day and Oh What a Beautiful Morning from “Oklahoma!” Later, guitarist and vocalist John Pizzarelli came out to do some Sinatra tunes, including Nice ‘N’ Easy and How About You. To wrap the whole thing up, Oosterhuis and Pizzarelli performed a rousing closing tune: Jimmy Buffet’s Another Saturday Night, which you can hear on Oosterhuis’ album that she recorded with the Clayton Hamilton Jazz Orchestra. Or just listen right here on YouTube.

This all ended around 1:30 am, at which point I hopped back on a train thar arrived back in Amsterdam around 3am. I grabbed my bike and pedaled home to finally get some sleep around 4am (right around when the sun starts coming up at this longitude).

And that, folks, was day one.

The latest album from DMB has lots of energy, thanks in no small part to these two guys, but the two have done wonders for rejuvenating old classics the band recorded back in the 90s. Part of the reason DMB fans go to concert after concert, year after year, is because the band is always reinventing themselves, coming up with new ways to perform their songs.

The two audio examples below are a perfecte example of Coffin & Ross’ contributions to this constance music renaissance going on within the band. The song is a class, #41, from Crash, the album that thrust them into the big time. I think they won a Grammy for it too. But anyway, Coffin and Ross have developed a killer riff that they roll through together during the extended solo/jam, but as you’ll notice from the examples, it has changed a bit (and only gotten better) over the course of a few years.

The first example is off the Live at Mile High Music Festival release from early 2008. By listening, you’ll notice that Ross and Coffin aren’t exactly clicking on this riff yet. It almost sounds like Ross either forgot or hadn’t entirely memorized the thing. He drops out, and re-enters later in the riff, and at times he misses a note here and there. Also notice how Carter Beauford’s drumming steps on the riff a bit.

Now listen to the second example, recorded by a fan at the August 2009 Phoenix show (at which I was in attendance). The audio quality isn’t as good, obviously, but Coffin and Ross have improved this riff ENORMOUSLY. They both know every note to perfection, and execute it flawlessly, starting mellow and eventually growing over the 2 minute break. Carter has also learned his role for this, chilling out early on and letting the mood settle before helping them with the push to the end.

I just love this stuff. It’s the reason I pay $40-80 each year to see these guys.