Home Music Mike Gordon Brings His Quintet To Phoenix In 2018

Mike Gordon Brings His Quintet To Phoenix In 2018

172

Bassist Mike Gordon and his band of guitarist Scott Murawski, drummer John Kimock, keyboardist Robert Walter and percussionist Craig Myers kick off a two-week tour at Variety Playhouse in Atlanta tomorrow on Friday, March 8. As a preview of the run, this week’s Throwback Thursday features high-quality video footage of their entire February 21, 2018 concert at the Crescent Ballroom in Phoenix.

Gordon has kept his repertoire fairly lean over the course of his past few tours since the release of OGOGO in 2017. That fall, when asked about finding a balance between the new (at the time of the interview) songs and older material, Mike told JamBase:

That’s an interesting puzzle for me. It’s interesting for me because I have funny relationships with songs in that it can go a lot of different ways. If I really love a song, sometimes I don’t want to play it very much because I want to keep that spark so it feels like the first time each time, which is sort of a funny equation to have when you’re a touring musician. I’m not always worried about that, but it’s just an example of how my creative brain ticks.

With older stuff, some fans have been requesting that I play older Mike songs like songs from Inside In, but what it comes down to, even if they are requests or whatever there is, I just have to resonate. It’s more important than ever to me to sing from the heart and to believe in what I’m singing. That doesn’t mean that it always has to be some very literal sentiment that’s being processed and that’s what I have to sing – it still could be an experimental thing, or playful thing, or even maybe just a bunch of patterns, but on some level it has to be the truth. I guess I feel like there are certain songs that I appreciate from the past, [that] I appreciate something about, but the overall experience is not resonating, so I just say, “OK, well maybe someday there will be something to be salvaged here, but right now I just have to go with what feels right,” so that serves to reduce the song list. Not to mention that Scott and I wrote a lot of material for the album. We wrote three albums worth … there is an inclination to play songs that just didn’t fit the album but we love anyway. OGOGO is the big focus but it’s not the only thing going, it’s juggling.

It will be interesting to see what the band has in store now that we’re nearly two years beyond the release of OGOGO. Gordon and Murawski are prolific writers and it’s hard to think they don’t have new material for the tour. “I keep such long lists of both covers and originals that I would like to play, but I keep trying to resist the temptation to learn too much because I find we can really sink our teeth into the material we have if there aren’t too many songs,” the bassist said in a 2015 interview with JamBase. “If I had a choice I would never go on any tour without some new material because it ends up being so fun.”

The show featured below features eight of the 13 tracks on OGOGO. Mike and his band also work in Max Creek’s “Just A Rose,” “The Field” and “Jones” as well as covers of Jon Cleary’s “Got To Be More Careful,” Fiona Apple’s “Sleep To Dream,” Leo Kottke’s “Noon To Noon” and Rancid’s “Ruby Soho.” The only classic material played in Phoenix was “Destiny Unbound,” a song Mike wrote for Phish in 1990, “Morphing Again” from Gordon’s 2008 album The Green Sparrow and both “Face” and “Say Something” off 2014’s Overstep. Watch the entire concert thanks to LA2V and head to LivePhish.com for an official recording of the February 21, 2008 performance:

Setlist & Tracklist

  • 00:00:00 Set One: Crowd
  • 00:01:16 Stealing Jamaica
  • 00:07:24 Crazy Sometimes
  • 00:18:09 Just A Rose
  • 00:27:21 Morphing Again
  • 00:32:48 The Field
  • 00:37:58 Morphing Again
  • 00:38:33 Got To Be More Careful
  • 00:46:03 Destiny Unbound
  • 00:55:16 Go Away
  • 01:03:36 Set Two: Crowd
  • 01:04:37 Up And Down
  • 01:09:17 Comes
  • 01:17:07 Dig Further Down
  • 01:23:34 SleepTo Dream – So Far Gone
  • 01:32:27 Steps
  • 01:41:10 Say Something
  • 01:49:36 Whirlwind
  • 01:57:50 Noon To Noon
  • 02:07:30 Face
  • 02:20:02 E1: Marissa
  • 02:27:51 E2: Ruby Soho