180 degrees of music

"Mental Notes" Live

Mental Notes is an original jam band comprised of intelligent musicians that plays a high-energy combination of old school acid rock, funk and hip-hop. Mental Notes combines elements of diverse musical styles to create an intense listening experience. Mental Notes plays throughout the New York City area, and, having seen them perform for the past few weeks, I strongly recommend that, if you are around New York City, you check this band out. If you are not in New York, they have a great live cd available by mail.

Over the past decades "jam" bands have occupied a unique place in music and Mental Notes picks up where the traditional jam bands leave off and puts its own spin on the jam genre. A cd version of a song may run four minutes, but, when performed live by a jam band, can run three or four times as long. Mental Notes uses the extended jam format of traditional rock bands and expands on that by adding large doses of hip-hop and funk to rock.

If you are familiar with the southern rock sounds of The Allman Brothers, Government Mule and The Outlaws, or San Francisco musicians such as The Grateful Dead, Neil Young and Santana, then you know that when jam musicians perform live, they connect with their audience in a way that makes the audience feel that they are participating in an event that no one aside from the people at the show will ever be part of. This connection is made with the audience through the musician's rendition of familiar songs played in an extended format.

Jamming is primal. It is not about the band; it is about the connection between the band and the audience and the audience members with each other. Think about jam bands this way: when making love with someone that you are really into, do you want it to last several minutes or several hours? For jam enthusiasts, if you analogize to music, the answer is several hours. While not literally looking for non-stop three hour jams, the jam fan wants two things from a jam band: (1) faithfulness to the structure of the song; and (2) time.

As jam aficionados know, it is not nearly enough to play a song for 12 minutes or more, it is about maintaining the overall cohesiveness of the piece while allowing it to expand on its elements. In other words, the rhythm section is the anchor for the band, allowing vocals, guitars, horns, keyboards to explore and experiment, while maintaining the structure of the song. For any great jam, the listener needs enough time to sit back and take in all the elements of the song without being forced to absorb everything in a 4-minute radio-friendly format. A jam band provides its audience with time to go from one aspect of the performance to another at their own pace. The audience can focus on each of the musicians and what they are doing, without needing audio cues to get their attention. Mental Notes is in the mold of the quintessential jam band. They allow you the freedom to go where you want to go at whatever pace you want.

Mental Notes has a fresh sound and a loyal following. They are one of the hot local bands on the New York scene, and I definitely recommend that you check out one of their shows.

Mental Notes is: d (squared) - bass; d (one) - guitar; travesty - drums; spiritchild - mc/vocals; lloyd - trumpet; and static - dj.