Black Milk with Nat Turner Band live show review @ Jazz Café presented by Doctor’s Orders Support by Micall Parknssun with Joker Starr, DJ Jazz T & Durrty Goodz
Black Milk returned to London’s Jazz Café with the Nat Turner band compromising of keys, sampler, live bass and drums. The crowd was impeccably warmed up by a boom-bap heavy set by Micall Parknssun, assisted by the hype antics of Joker Starr and impeccable scratches laid down by DJ Jazz T. A pleasant surprise was seeing the versatile mainstay of the grime scene. Durrty Goodz hit the stage to preview a song from upcoming EP with Micall Prknssun. Now on to the next.
Nat Turner’s spacey synth intro drum-rolled Black Milk down the Jazz Café stairs to energetically, fist-up-in-the-air launch into organ driven Long Story Short from Black Milk’s debut album. This transitioned into latest album (If There’s a Hell Below) opener Everyday Was: A booming and epic bass guitar driven soundscape with Black Milk’s intricate double time flow weaving coming-of-age narratives. The live drumming was from the ‘hit ‘em as hard as you can’ school of percussion and this boded well for the night with a happy head-nodding fist-pumping audience.
Black Milk had a delightful comradery with the band that emanated from every note played and drum hit. Their intuitive sense of timing had Black Milk seamlessly transition the classic Hip-Hop ‘beat drop’ (for those who don’t know, it’s when the DJ mutes or ‘drops’ the beat to accentuate the ends or significant parts of the emcee’s lines) into a live band setting for several bars at a time with a near invisible flick of the wrist. I doubt however, that Black Milk would fine the Nat Turner Band members (à la James Brown) if they were to ever miss beats because he just seems too nice a guy to do that. Call and responses were heartfelt and in between songs he never shouted at the audience in tropes but rather, established a sincere rapport through conversational dialogue. Black Milk genuinely treated the audience like his friends.
An homage to Detroit’s techno scene (their techno sounds very different to the sound many of us in the UK associate with techno) was offered via songs like Detroit’s New Dance Show with breakneck speed instrumentation and rhyming turning the Jazz Café into a frenetic dance floor. Ultimately, Black Milk presented a table spread of his prolific discography including Random Axe (project with Sean Price and Guilty Simpson) and Black and Brown (project with Danny Brown) material. This pleased avid Black Milk fans whilst giving a perfectly definitive entry point to what he and Nat Turner stand for: Live Hip-Hop as a form of modern Black Soul Music.
