The Philadelphia collective The Roots received the mandate, Saturday evening, to close 10 days of a 42e Jazz generous in sunshine and warming music. The hip-hop roadsters, who were reuniting after more than a decade, gave glory to the big names in funk, rap, disco, soul and R&B in a relentless orchestral fire.
Posted at 7:00 a.m.
Those who were at the Place des Festivals will remember it for a long time. They could not breathe for a nanosecond, carried away for almost two hours by the quickdraw of Tariq Trotter (Black Thought) and his expert band.
About two-thirds of the pieces played on the big stage were deconstructed borrowings, mixed and reworked in an orchestral hip-hop style. The singer, dressed in a white tracksuit and wearing a beige fedora, quickly pocketed the monster crowd as he infused his Get Busy (2008) very funk jungle boogie signed Kool & the Gang. “Get down, get down / Get down, get down. »
PHOTO SARAH MONGEAU-BIRKETT, THE PRESS
Saxophonist Ian Hendrickson-Smith and tompettist Dave Guy
The brass section, the main jazz guarantee of The Roots, quickly offered its first thrills, and was not going to stop.
It was especially necessary to see the athletic Tuba Gooding Jr. jump with his sousaphone, by definition oversized, and to hear Dave Guy shouting in his triumphant trumpet.
Add saxophone, transverse flute (Ian Hendrickson-Smith), keytar, guitar (Captain Kirk Douglas) and bass (Mark Kelley), and everything was in place for an acoustic discharge unrivaled in contemporary hip-hop. .
An oversight? Between the two keyboardists Kamel Gray and James Poyser, the inimitable drummer Questlove – and co-founder of The Roots – marked the rhythm on a raised platform. Surgical, omniscient, metronomic: it was his throne.
Lose the thread
Sometimes, The Roots invites You’re The One For Me by funk duo D. Train. Another moment, he invites Soul Makossa, catchphrase of Cameroonian saxophonist Manu Dibango borrowed – plundered? – by Michael Jackson, then Rihanna. It will be immediately ThinkTwiceby Erikah Badu, and Looking at the Front Doorfrom Main Source, which will be entitled to a very “Rootian” fusion.
Halfway through, the string of songs What They Do, NextMovement and Act Too (The Love of My Life)the last two taken from the legendary Things Fall Apart (1999), was able to satiate fans of the original content of the Philadelphia training.
For a long time, the order of the songs no longer mattered; it would be a rolling fire of back and forth, soulful winks, jazz jams, cutting and recutting, the whole welded together by the assured and swift flow of Black Thought and the esprit de corps of the musicians, who risked here and there a light choreography at the forefront.
PHOTO SARAH MONGEAU-BIRKETT, THE PRESS
The crowd was filled for this last evening of the festival.
Based on its experience of house band (house band) with Jimmy Fallon from 2009 to 2014, the troupe formed in 1987 knows how to bounce back. It’s good Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) that guitarist Kirk Douglas sang in the confusing rock segment allotted to him.
What an evening it was! A perfect end point to a festival that was coming back to life after two years of latency! The presence of The Roots in Montreal, the only Canadian stop at the heart of its American summer tour, was offered as a gift to festival-goers, quicker than ever to get carried away, rock and warm up, by the sun as well as by the music.