Music
Anderson .Paak and the Free Nationals
O2 ABC, Glasgow
Jamie Chambers
five stars
ARE you listening Glasgow? After Kamasi Washington’s ebullient set at the QMU, here was another of America’s most essential contemporary musicians making a maiden appearance in Scotland this week: Anderson .Paak.
It takes a certain grace to treat a small, sweaty venue on a Wednesday night like it’s a headline set at Coachella. .Paak is a stadium-sized talent, and it’s a rare, momentous occasion to see him play a venue so intimate and inauspicious, it can barely contain him. He appears as a sudden jolt of electricity – just a DJ and .Paak, wild and lucid in a bomber jacket and aviators. It’s more than enough, and yet there is more. Two songs in, .Paak brings on The Free Nationals: a guitar-driven 3-piece with the all rangy charge of a punk band. As the excitement ratchets up, I find my eyes wandering over to the empty kit on the left of stage, thinking of the lithe, gorgeous drumming on .Paak’s 2016 standout Malibu. Where is the Free Nationals’ drummer? But of course: the drummer is .Paak himself, and with Carry Me he takes up sticks to reveal not only can he drum like Billy Cobham, he can freestyle as nimbly as Kendrick while he does so.
Anderson .Paak is quite simply one of the best entertainers I’ve seen in years; an entertainer in the same sense as James Brown, Prince or D’Angelo, which is to say, an artist. Perhaps most importantly of all, he is intensely generous. Dancing amongst the crowd, laughing when a hug with a screaming fan almost pulls him off stage, you think he’s giving you everything that he’s got, until he gives you more.
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