Donkey Monkey is a piano/drum-duet of the French pianist Eve Risser and the Japanese drummer Yuko Oshima. The name expresses the unrest that is to be found in their music - though the monkey element was seemingly stronger than the donkey element. Anyway, Risser's playing was quite nice, oscillating between traditional and modern piano jazz styles - it reminded me of Aki Takase's homages to W.C. Handy and Fats Waller, but Risser's playing is more fluent than Takase's - and therefore more "normal". Yuko Oshima played with a mostly brutal, heavy attack - and thus destroyed quite a bit of the music. I'm not against loud and heavy music - I'm a rocker at heart -, but in this case the drums seemed to hammer down all the interesting lines of the piano. Yuko Oshima's really not a bad drummer though - some of her work in the morning improvisation sessions was more versatile and highly communicative with her co-players. But in the Donkey Monkey thing on the main stage her playing was rather minded on effect than on interplay.
See what Plushmusic's Lutz Eitel says about this concert.
See Donkey Monkey's MySpace-site.
See the promo text of the concert in the virtual Moers Festival magazine (in German).
See the band info on their label's website.
May 26, 2010
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2 comments:
agree with every word which you said. the only thing that I don't understand is that how come the monkey could be so brutal? I thought that they should be rather natured with more trickiness.
The brutality couldn't be attributed to the donkey either, right?
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