Les Claypool

Les Claypool, the rock bass genius, leader and mastermind behind Primus and its various spin-off and parallel projects, returned to Italy once again with a mini-tour, whose third and final date took place at a packed New Age venue on March 13, 2010.

The official excuse is the chance to see him in his umpteenth band reincarnation, promoting his latest concept album (the twin of "Of Whales And Whoe" from three years earlier), "Of Fungi And Foe" (Prawn Song, 2009), less and less a group effort and more and more centred around his own personality. The unofficial excuse, and the more relevant one deep down, is the chance to admire, without any particular intellectual effort, one of the absolute masters of the instrument, the inventor of a technique, a prodigy of tangled funk rhythms, dense, lopsided percussiveness, and improvisation bordering on the paradoxical.

Opening the set are London's Hot Head Show, fronted by Copeland Jr.'s son (Jordan, guitarist and singer, the offspring of Stewart Copeland of the Police and Sonja Kristina of Curved Air), a thrilling mass of Beefheart-esque riffs (and a warped jam that sounds even more Claypool than Claypool himself does nowadays, though he also proves to be an excellent talent scout), with jaw-dropping breaks tossed off with the utmost ease.

The superstar headliner Les Claypool appears accompanied by the "Fungi Band", namely Mike Dillon on percussion, Sam Bass on electrified cello and Paul Baldi on drums. The overall impression, confirmed as the show goes on, is one of a suitably surreal atmosphere as intended by the frontman, which spills over into yet another tribute to the Residents: the use of masks, the supporting cast in tailcoats, the ostentatious percussion, the homemade instruments, the primitive electronics. But the one who steals the show is, as always, Leslie Claypool himself, whose devotion to his own persona has by now become almost haughty; his movements on bass are fully controlled, his singing a crystal toy of restrained power (which only occasionally erupts, but always lost within the folds of improvisation, as in the opener entrusted to a cocky "Rumble Of The Diesel"). In his interplay, his command of the stage, and even in the smallest of gestures, there's not a single flaw, not even in the fitting tribute paid to the memory of Primus, "Duchess And The Proverbial Mind Spread".

While his brilliance on bass sounds somewhat restrained, the stylistic range is broadened by his interaction with the band members' powerful instrumental excursions (dub, jazzy, jam-rock, etc.), so much so that the frontman often steps aside to give them free rein ("Hendershot", "Drum And Whamola Jam"), popping up now and then behind his odd double-necked bass, with a Bass sound edging ever closer to Lalonde's noise, and a drummer not far from Tim Herb, in a prism of improvisation that never misses a beat.

The great, cold professionalism that dampens the overall impact is therefore a stopgap for the current Claypool, less and less a band member (and no longer even just a bandleader) and more and more a father figure and sole master, less and less an instrumentalist (whose electric bass he often treats with snobbish indifference) and more and more a distillation of charisma, closer to Zappa the orchestra conductor, or to the jazz-rock Miles Davis. It's a confirmation, and something of a betrayal, on the part of a musician who has used his own haughtiness as a foundational part of his art.

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