Change The Beat in SF Weekly
Thanks to Ron Nachmann
Last Night: Echo Party featuring Edan and Ricky Powell
 |
| L-R Ricky Powell, DJ Centipede, Edan |
Echo Party featuring Edan and Ricky Powell
Tuesday, Jan. 19, 2010
SOM
Better Than: Sitting home stoned, drawing cartoons and blasting beats while you watch Lost with the sound down.
Too few music fans see hip-hop as a cultural phenomenon of DIY media and craft. But since it hatched in the South Bronx in the late-’70s, hip-hop’s cut-and-paste approach to music, video, and photography has been key to Western pop culture.
Both Boston MC/DJ/producer Edan and veteran NYC street photographer Ricky Powell proudly continue that collage tradition, which made them a great pairing for the resurrection of local DJ Centipede’s vaunted underground beat lounge Change the Beat.
 |
| DJ Edan on mic, and turntables |
This proved to be a night of millions of images and beats, all dating from before the mid-’90s. After Centipede’s short set of exotic beats, Powell opened up with a tour-de-force narrated slide show of random shots from the past 27 years of his work. These included simple, evocative snaps of rap stars like Run DMC and Schooly D, celebrities like Andy Warhol and Sandra Bernhardt, and the occasional street-bum or girlfriend. As a legendary East Village man-about-town and the Beastie Boys’ first official photographer during their party-fuelled mid-’80s ascent, Powell played a brilliant Uncle Old School to the mostly under-30 crowd in SOM’s elegant yet inviting surroundings.
 |
| Casual fashion done right at Change the Beat: Echo Party |
Edan’s Echo Party mixtape was the centerpiece of the night, and it’s definitely an art project. He didn’t just layer a bunch of his own psychedelic instrumentation and effects over his mix of old-school beats and breaks from the vaults of New York’s Traffic Entertainment Group label–he also hand-art-stamped the covers of the 1,000-piece vinyl edition.
If that weren’t enough, last night saw the West Coast premiere of a quick-cut abstract video collage interpretation of Echo Party created by Tom Fitzgerald, the head archivist at L.A.’s Cinefamily film organization and Cut Chemist’s video man. In perfect rhythm with Edan’s intense rhythmic mess, Fitzgerald has mixed and manipulated 29 mondo minutes worth of obscure ’70s and ’80s footage of nightlife, breakdancing, kung fu, technology and tons more from Bollywood, Brooklyn and beyond. It was an overwhelming feast of underground recycled media.
 |
| The blissful masses at Change the Beat: Echo Party |
Edan closed the night with a 2-hour DJ set of arcane yet weirdly recognizable late-’60s and early freak-rock tunes, most of which happen to have beat-only breakdowns that he could juggle in fine hip-hop DJ tradition. For the non-pathological beat fiends, he did deign to rock the backwards beats of Jimi Hendrix’s “Are You Experienced.”
Critic’s Notebook
Personal Bias: Today’s hip-hop and celeb culture needs to work really hard to measure up to the sophistication of their pre-1995 golden eras.
Random Detail: Ricky Powell could be the only photog on earth to have shot artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, received both a platonic kiss from Sandra Bernhardt and a playful headlock from Mike Tyson, and smoked a blunt with Eazy E. Though not all at once.
By the way: Although both the vinyl and CD versions of Echo Party are sold out, a DVD of the video version is forthcoming–stay tuned to Edan for more.
Echo Party feat. Edan & Ricky Powell @ SOM, San Francisco 1/19/10 (excerpts) from Shockman on Vimeo.
