Riley: Walking into Neumos this past Friday, I thought there must've been some mistake. The dancefloor was empty, the music uninspired, and one of the speakers apparently blown. Then I looked down at my watch: 9:30. I'd forgotten that electronic music operates on a rather different schedule. Two hours of chatter and one overpriced beverage later, a foot-tapping audience had materialized and Mark Farina was about to grab the DJ baton. "It's about damn time," I murmured as I wormed my way through the cheering crowd. "Mushroom Jazz ahoy."
Tighe: An apt recollection of a rather confusing beginning to that night. As Farina dropped that first beat of that first track it was almost as if he had been playing peak hour selections for the last hour and a half, the way the crowd was moving. From my vantage point (near Om's lovely dried flowers and Buddha statue) I peeped a visible surge forward by the already intoxicated audience, pushing those 10-15 really drunk dancing ladies right into the maw of it all. The sudden, out-of-the-blue funk bomb was a rather nice surprise, though I guess I should have expected as much from one of the industry's best.
Riley: Great, now I'm having trouble getting horrible "funk bomb" images out of my head. Ahem. Maybe I was overly influenced by Farina's background in the Chicago and San Francisco schools of house music, but I was somewhat taken aback by the ~100bpm hip-hop-friendly tempo of Farina's first tracks. Taken aback for about 30 seconds, which coincidentally is about how long it took that initial bassline to invade my spine and put an idiotic smile on my face. Sample-spotting skills admittedly dulled, I managed to catch snippets of Beck and Digable Planets amid a downtempo intro that exuded more energy than your typical happy hardcore set. Just the thing to prep the throng for a careful slide of the fader into decidedly house-flavored territory.
Tighe: It was that aforementioned house flavor that really surprised me. I attended, fully expecting a Mushroom Jazz 6 promotion, but instead got a teaspoon of that soulful, hip-hoppy M.Jazz, and a tankard full of that San Fran jazz house I remember bootlegging off of GrooveRadio back in '00. The tracks were powerful and groovy, yet somehow managed an air of relaxation that, with the voice of the late Mr. Hayes, constantly whispering in my ear, "It's okay to dance, this is the music of loooooooooove, baby."
Riley: I guess I'll be digging up my copy of MJ6, because that effortless blend of hip-hop, breakbeat, funk, and soul was exactly what I'd been craving. While I had to ditch the dancing just as the music was peaking (damn friends and their inconvenient birthday parties!), I did so with the utmost reluctance. When I first heard the term "mushroom jazz" years ago, I dismissed it as yet another moniker for stoner techno, no doubt accompanied by clichéd Matrix dialog and pseudo-psychadelic cover art. Needless to say, I won't be making that mistake again. Mark Farina's decades of relentless touring have become a form of musical evangelism, and I count myself lucky to be one his most recent converts.
