It’s sparkly, relentlessly melodic, infused with familiar reference points from funk, neo-soul, the left-field hip-hop of J.
Their music, freakishly complex and virtuosic as it may be, is not a “difficult” listen. It was a weird moment, but somehow it didn’t feel like a stretch for these two to be sharing the stage with a gigantic pop star.
TOM ANDERSON GUITARS SAN BERNADINO SERIES
For a few minutes, near the end, the song devolved into a series of increasingly spicy jazz riffs, leaving Grande bobbing gamely along. Then there was the time last November when they performed for the virtual Adult Swim Festival alongside the bassist Thundercat, playing his song “Them Changes” with the pop star Ariana Grande on guest vocals. (That, or robots.) Before it emerged that the rapper MF Doom had died, the duo posted a video that bounced through selections from “Madvillainy,” his beloved 2004 album with Madlib - once again taking what had been revolutionary and pulling it still further. Last summer, when the Roots assembled a virtual concert, Beck and DOMi made a video appearance, and several of the comments beneath had to do with their otherworldliness: The ongoing joke is that these two might be aliens, crash-landed on Earth to teach a new form of music. There’s a whole subsection of YouTube videos just trying to unpack Beck’s drumming. Clips of them in sponsored sessions - for, say, the keyboard maker Nord or the cymbal maker Zildjian - are followed by reaction videos from older musicians who cannot believe their eyes or ears. Over the past year or two, as posts of their shows and rehearsals came online, a lot of people have had similar reactions to DOMi and J.D.
Not because the music was funny, but because you have got to be kidding me: Who were these kids? What? WHAT? After a few minutes I started emitting short, snorting laughs. Beck (16 at the time) and the keyboard player DOMi (19) - and I thought, in this exact order: Oh. Then I watched this duo do “Giant Steps” - not Bieber and Aguilera, but the drummer J.D. “Giant Steps” has been played countless times by countless people, but no version I’d ever encountered came close to the breakneck virtuosity and thrill of that original. The great pianist Tommy Flanagan takes his solo haltingly on the original recording, racing to keep pace, the music careering out ahead of him. The song is a whirling dervish: 26 chord changes in 16 rapid-fire bars, a steady spiral of major-third modulations that can make even the most adept players scramble. To understand what happens next, you must appreciate that “Giant Steps” isn’t merely Coltrane’s masterpiece it’s among the more difficult jazz standards to perform. Then they launch into John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps.” In the video of this show, shot at a Los Angeles venue in January 2020, you can barely see his face - it’s covered by a mop of child-in-a-Dutch-master’s-painting hair - but the keyboard player gives him the sort of smile you throw at a friend across the room at a party, a private-joke smile.
He taps his sticks against the high-hat, a sprinter shaking it out before crouching down to wait for the sound of the starter pistol. And the first song we’re going to cover, she wrote when she was kind of like, minus two months before Jesus Christ? And it’s called ‘Giant Steps.’” Then, her blond hair catching the light and turning an electric purple, she speaks, in a thick French accent: “Thank you for coming to the Billie Eilish cover band.” More chuckles. Paak.) Just before they settle in - he’s on drums, she’s on keyboards - she hits a button that unleashes that air-horn sound effect: be-be-be-brahhhhh. (The outfits were given to them by a mentor, the rapper, singer and producer Anderson. What they are wearing is ridiculous, like puffy ski suits from the 1980s: jumpsuit emojis come to life, the kind of fashion that seems pulled from the internet’s id.
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