Summer 2014: Daptone Super Soul Revue, Arcade Fire

Thanks for stopping by and please pardon the radio silence...we've been busy. This summer has been another whirlwind. Nine countries and tens of thousands of miles later, there is a spare write a blog entry.

We performed live at the Primavera Festival in Barcelona, Summer Jazz in Leiden (NL), and two shows at Le Zenith with Arcade Fire.

Then we flew back to the US and played two shows at Mountain Jam in New York.

Then we flew to Rome, and did a show there with Arcade Fire. Then we got on a shuttle, a subway a train and a bus, and went to Verona, where we played in a castle, also with Arcade Fire. Then we woke up, flew to London, and met up with the 18 other musicians from the Daptone Super Soul Revue.

We had a long day of rehearsal, then played the next night at the Shepherd's Bush Empire. From there Glastonbury and a whole bunch of other festivals, zigzagging across Europe in a caravan of three buses and a production truck with Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, Charles Bradley and the Extraordinaires, Saun and Starr, and the Sugarman Three. You can read more about the day-by-day of the tour (logged by Antibalas's Martín Perna) here: http://daptonerecords.tumblr.com/

One of the best shows was in Vienne, France. Here's a video of the complete performance:

Each night we would finish the whole revue with "Family Affair" by Sly and the Family Stone. Most nights it was something like this...

After Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland, we flew back to the US and a few days later went played Maximum Fun's Atlantic Ocean Comedy and Music Festival on a boat full of comedians and musicians that left from Florida and went to two islands in the Bahamas.

Coming up in August we have a few more big shows with the Arcade Fire in Maine, Massachusetts and Washington, DC.

In September, we'll be doing a show in NYC at Le Poisson Rouge where we'll be playing some of the music of prolific composer John Lurie along with our original music and will be spending a lot of the fall working on finishing (and maybe even recording) new material.

Spring 2014 Update

We're back from a whirlwind trip to the amazing Ecuador Jazz Festival 2014 where we kicked off the festival at the Teatro Sucre in the historic center of Quito. The trip and the crowd were amazing. It was a seated theater, but midway through the first song, tail feathers lifted and started to shake until the last note.

Up next: we're supporting a ridiculously amazing and talented set of musicians at Carnegie Hall in just two short weeks, playing some of Paul Simon's hits (as well as obscurities) with legends such as Allen Toussaint, Sam Moore, Judy Collins, Bob Mould, John Doe (of X), Angelique Kidjo, Mike Gordon (Phish) and Bettye LaVette and others.

After that, Primavera Festival in Barcelona in May, followed by a three week run as part of the Daptone Super Soul Revue at some of the top festivals in Europe including Jazz Fest Wien,  North Sea Jazz Festival, Rock Werchter, Vienna Jazz Festival,  Jazz à Vienne, Eurockeennes, and many others. Stay tuned.