Kahvas Jute Live At The Basement, 18th July 2005

Well, I must say from the start that we have always thought that they were master musicians and they re-enforced this in our minds tonight. Daisley was superb in his fluidity and accuracy, Wilson was scintillating in his soloing and effects pedal manipulation and of course Tim Gaze was faultless in rhythym guitar. Drummer was not Davidson for some reason, but instead Mark Marriott who was fantastic and a really hard hitter. Maybe Danny D. would have played with more finnese, but that's a minor point.

They played Ascend, Free, She's so Hard to Shake and 3 - 4 others from "Wide Open" including Parade of Fools which started with Dennis opening up the delay effect and hammering with knuckles up and down the fretboard (which I have seen him do in The Deltoids) before Daisley and Gaze slowly crept in with their guitars and Hoad with drums and "went off" on a 15 minute version to including dual soloing by Dennis and Tim that was so good it made you feel like rocking & jumping like a teenager. The bass solo in She's so Hard to Shake was great and we were all impressed. Dennis was doing the lead guitar and most of the solo's but Tim took on some guitar soloing/leads at times and we were similarly impressed by these as well. He was very fluid and has his own style which was apparent esp. when he got onto a memorable solo, played mostly with razor-sharp licks, down the bottom of the fretboard.

They played 5 new tracks they composed as well. These were tracks which sounded very much like Kahvas Jute and not like a band trying to do something new which didn't suit them etc…. From what I could gather, only one of these tracks was blues-based. The others were quite in the vein of hard/progressive rock. Me and my mates are mainly fans/collectors of progressive rock, so this suited us well.

They also played some blues tracks and one of them was fronted on vocals by Jimmy Barnes (ex-Cold Chisel) who was asked to do so by KJ/Daisley. We thought it somewhat of an intrusion, to be honest……and a bit surreal.

They played to only about 60 people in total, for 2 hours with no breaks. When they were cookin', they were very tight, which was > 90% of the time. The DVD production people asked KJ to do 1 more take each of "Free" and 2 of their new tracks which they did play at the end. A very pleasant bonus indeed.

Going by what we experienced I would suggest to anyone into this genre to buy the DVD of this gig when its released. My 3 mates thanked me profusely for inviting them as it was a totally brilliant gig/time. This is probably an understatement.

Prog Rules!

God Protect Kahvas Jute.