Photos and Review by Max Stewart
There are shows where you watch the band, and then there are shows where you spend half the night staring at the stage completely in awe of what you are watching. DOMi & JD BECK landed firmly in the latter category Tuesday night at Atlanta’s Variety Playhouse. No opener, no warm-up lap, just two expert-level musicians, a stack of keyboards, a relatively modest drum kit, and enough notes to fill three other concerts. The crowd was its own fascinating cocktail: young obsessive music fans (Atlanta’s own Faye Webster was in the audience) along with veteran jazz heads who probably saw the Weather Report connection coming before the first note was played and watched the duo’s recent Rick Beato interview. When the pair broke out Weather Report’s “Fast City,” you could almost feel one generation of the room giving the other a nod.
Calling what DOMi and JD Beck do “jazz” feels a little like calling a Formula One car “transportation.” It only scratches the surface. DOMi’s hands seemed to operate independently from the rest of her body, bouncing between synths and keys while melodies collided. Beck, meanwhile, played drums like someone had accidentally set the human metronome to 2x speed. He would cram what sounded like 40 beats into a space meant for eight, stop on a dime, leave a tiny pocket of air and then come crashing back in… and all so tastefully.
The material from WHO ASKED? gave them plenty of room to get weird, particularly “HAD ENOUGH,” “GROWiNG OLDER,” “OUT OF SYNC” and “CONCERTiNO,” music that can feel impossibly dense on first listen but becomes something different when you see how physically these two have to wrestle it into existence. The duo followed WHO ASKED? just two weeks later with YOU ASKED!, an instrumental version of the same album that strips away the vocals and leaves all that beautifully complicated machinery exposed.. which feels closer to the experience of seeing DOMi and Beck onstage. Their recent conversation with Beato offered an even deeper glimpse behind the curtain, including how some of this material was constructed in notation software before they actually had to figure out how to play the damn thing. That tracks. At times Tuesday night it felt less like watching songs being performed and more like watching two people successfully escape traps they had designed for themselves.
And yet, for all the Berklee-brain insanity happening onstage, the evening never felt too cool for its own good. That is what separates DOMi & JD BECK from so many technically gifted musicians. There is humor in it (yes… there were a few fart noises in between songs). There is obviously swagger in it. Most importantly, there is groove buried beneath all those notes. By the time older favorites like “DUKE” and “SPACE MOUNTAiN” arrived, the Weather Report fans, Beato faithfuls, jazz students and curious bystanders had all been sucked into the same strange orbit. You could spend the entire ride home trying to figure out exactly what DOMi & JD Beck were doing up there. Or you could accept the simpler explanation: two freakishly talented musicians bent time for a couple hours in Atlanta, smiled while doing it and left the rest of us to figure out what just happened.
