Jamie Cullum concert

Jamie Cullum concert



After driving for 5 hours straight on the motorway finally I found bloody Shepherd's Bush, and the Empire. The tickets online were £18.50 but as we had none, my dad arrived at 5pm to blag two tickets for £50 each. It still turned out to be worth every penny. Cullum is an exceptional talent, and one hell of a showman. If there is any justice he will achieve more than Elton John. He certainly has the talents at his disposal. (At one point he split the audience into two for some two-part harmony singing while he ad libbed on top ... it was ace! He wanted us to clap along to keep time but only about 3 ppl in the whole venue did, and the other 2 stopped shortly after, and he looked straight at me for ages!!!!)



In some ways he is very like me. He draws on influences from all over the musical world - at one point he was playing Radiohead's High and Dry, then a Nat King Cole song (How Deep Is the Ocean) before an interlude where he explained how RATM and Nirvana also ranked amongst his other influences. An incredible concert :) And I might add, refreshing also to be at a concert where the average audience age is below 65. What I didn't know was that Cullum arranges most of his stuff, which I guess seems pretty obvious in hindsight as 90% of his output isn't his own compositions. But he has acoustic AND electric bass in his lineup, as well as double bass, tenor sax, Bb clarinet, trombone, and the requisite percussion. He also performed some fairly unorthodox (some might say "postmodern" (Mic!!!!!!!)) techniques on the piano, like percussive qualities of the strings, the actual woodwork, kicking the underneath of it, and so forth. Very interesting to see a musician exploring the full harmonic capabilities of his instrument. Ok, enough raving about him. Haha.