When Mamer met Li TieQiao, Magic Happens and Dawanggang no shows

Remember that running joke about Wu & The Side Effects not really existing because they kept no-showing? Well, I’m ready to start using it on Dawanggang who’s bailed out on at least 4 shows I was supposed to catch them at.
Still, this past Thursday at Jianghu, the locals were out in force for the Kazak Eagle’s cooperation with one of Beijing’s premier Sax players.

The show started around 9:00 p.m. with a full house listening to the improvisations that took place on the tiny stage and went on until about 11:30. If nothing else, we can’t complain that we didn’t get our money worth in performance time.

The show itself? Fairly interesting if not remarkable! Mamer went through 4 instruments on the evening, switching some of them halfway trough songs. He didn’t sing much and rather mumbled a few times in the microphone. One thing i noticed was how he played Bass on a few songs using a violin bow which was just weird.. but it worked! the guy has an amazing voice, I wish he’d use it more often.
Tieqiao kept the energy levels up with a variety of wind instruments ( sax, pipa, flute & Harmonica) and was clearly having tons of fun sharing the scene with Mamer.
There were some nice percussions courtesy of that-man-whose-name-i-always-forget, the Mexican lad that had a few sit ins with Panjir back in the days.. his beats provided a hypnotic background to the session.

I wish there had been more structure to the show instead of free streaming because those 3 are quite talented. Once they settled on a direction, they managed to keep the beat most of the time. Others, they just played along until one of them decided to change gears. Still, I’m glad we escaped the weirdness that accompanied Mamer’s last show where he had a case of mistaken identity thinking he was Xiao He.

A decent little Thursday outing with about 50 people, more than enough to crowd things up in the hutongs.

special props to the staff at Jianghu for:
1- remembering my drink of choice
2- making it the proper way