The Bays

The Bays & Heritage Orchestra & John Metcalfe @ Liverpool’s Fresh Festival, 4-1-8.

On their day, The Bays playing live is like an exciting musical trip that twists and turns at breakneck speeds. Unrehearsed, unrecorded and totally improvised, The Bays are the one of the most important bands about at the moment. Tonight’s World Premier, well surely all Bays gigs are premiers, sees The Bays line up with the fantastic Heritage Orchestra and Duretti Columns, John Metcalfe. The Bays lay down improvised tunes, starting off ambient and working their way through hip hop and house to hard as hell jungle, whilst Metcalfe writes live scores for the Orchestra to play instantly and on the fly. The Orchestra play the improvised score brilliantly and conductor Jules Buckley seems to be enjoying this one off opportunity. All this cracking music is backed up by some brilliant and beautiful visuals and a half decent sounding system tonight in The Philharmonic makes a good change. Unfortunatly the main problem with this gig is, in my opinion, is its all a little bit ambitious, The Bays are such a special band, tonight just holds them back too much, it’s almost as if they have had musical rules imposed upon them and the rules need to be broken. The Bays never let rip with the acid noises and club beats you usually get and that’s not too surprising when you have 30 classically trained musicians and a conductor in front of you, who do not know what you are going to do next.

www.thebays.com
barkermark2000@yahoo.co.uk
www.myspace.com/kingbats
www.freshfestival.com.
www.heritageorchestra.co.uk