Update: live music archives online, JFJO show

Had the chance to witness an incredible performance last night by the highly atypical piano jazz trio Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey in Norman. (You can read a brief preview of the show here.) The show was part of the 2007 fall Groovefest and was scheduled to be held outside in a park. But due to the threat of a lightning storm, it was moved inside to a small, hole-in-the-wall venue called the Deli. The energy was perfect, and the band absolutely tore it up.

The band recently took on a new, younger drummer, and the energy he brings is indispensible. If you’ve heard JFJO before, you know their music can be both electric and acoustic and can range from the avant-garde to more traditonal jazz by the likes of Ellington, Monk, and Mingus. But last night, in an all-electric show, they also brought the funk — even more so than usual — and they applied the punk aesthetic to a jazz trio in a way I’ve seldom heard before.

Needless to say, this morning I’ve been trying to find some live JFJO performances online that bear resemblance to the marvelous spectacle I observed last night. Of course, I checked out the Live Music Archive that I blogged about previously. But I also found some good stuff at nugs.net, and found some tracks that are quite similar to the ones I heard last night.

While I was at it, I browsed around the nugs site to check out what else is available from other artists. It appears that nugs serves as a clearing house of sorts, where interested persons can see what live digital recordings are out there, somewhere, online for, say, Phish, Widespread Panic, JFJO, or some other outfit that could potentially be labeled as a “jam band”. I guess, since tape trading became a popular thing initially among Grateful Dead fans, it only makes sense that most live digital music would be centered around the jam band scene.

And sure enough, another good place to find live digital downloads is at the website of the Bonnaroo festival — an annual event in Tennessee that began a few years ago to give all the jam bands and their fans a place to congregate and “freak out”. Also, if you’re a fan of Warren Haynes and Gov’t Mule, it looks like you can find some good stuff at this site, too.

I should point out that you have to pay for most of the downloads at the nugs and Bonnaroo sites (though nugs does have a “free stash“), while the downloads at the Live Music Archive are free. I don’t know if the quality of the pay-for shows are, on average, better than the free ones. But either way, there seems to be some good stuff out there.

And finally, here are links to some killer JFJO shows similar to last night’s; sound quality may vary. Some of the songs the band played last night were “Oklahoma Stomp”, “Dove’s Army of Love”, “Santiago”, and the closer, a cover of “Happiness is a Warm Gun”. Outstanding.

[Update: Just found a good article on another recent JFJO show that elaborates a little more on some of the aforementioned songs and states, quite rightly, that the fellas of JFJO are "on top of their game".]