Take note Sydney, a legendary institution has landed at your door. Russ Dewbury has brought the longest running club night in the world “A Night at The Jazz Rooms” over from Brighton to our fair shores, earning himself a “distinguished talent visa” in the process – the first DJ to have ever done so.
Distinguished Talent indeed. This guy put on one of the best shows I’ve seen. Funk and Soul have never sounded so authentic, so polished. I’d never been downstairs at the Civic before, but you couldn’t pick a better spot. The sunken dance floor, the disco ceiling, the couches that run up the walls – it’s the ideal place for a 9 piece funk band to take the stage and tear up a storm.
And after a perfectly placed warm up set from some of the DJ’s that’s exactly what Adelaide group The Transatlantics did. Dressed to the nines in their best suits, they play straight up big band funk that fills the floor before the end of the first 8 bars. They warm up for a few tracks before bringing out their tour de force of a vocalist, Tara Lynch, who wows the whole place with her impressive stage presense.
They bring a special kind of performance. They didn’t drive all the way from Adelaide to do some half arsed set, so they get their dance on, and deliver tightly executed funk that you could dance all night too.
Playing all that soul must get pretty tiring, so they gladly hand over the rigns to the man himself, who shows us exactly why this is the most successful club night in the world. You don’t survive for over 20 years in the music world without being a master of your craft, and that’s exactly what Mr Dewbury is.
He continues the funk for a while, then morphs it into an almost life changing jungle track – building the dance floor to a frenzy not often witnessed. From there it’s the perfect launching point to show us where drum and bass comes from – the jungle rhythms. That might have been the moment that drum and bass made sense for me.
Don’t even think about missing the next one – September 27th, at the Civic.
