David Byrne, St. Vincent, Ad-Rock Blow Minds With Contemporary Color Show
As we learned through Contemporary Color’s increasingly poignant video interstitials, color guard serves a similar mobilizing function for its participants, providing a sense of community and sanctuary during life’s most awkward, painful phase. And through this diverse cast of characters – who comprise a true cross-section of different races, orientations, socio-economic backgrounds, and body types – we see a different, but no less meaningful, realization of the liberating DIY philosophies that once drew to Byrne to punk. (Likewise, the odd flubbed saber toss is easily forgiven by the obvious intensity on display.) Contemporary Color’s most engaging piece, “What Are You Thinking?” paid tribute to this fortitude: atop a bubbling post-rock pastorale composed by Nico Muhly, This American Life host Ira Glass interviewed Trumbull, Connecticutt, troupe Alter Ego about color-guard technique, their recorded quotes perfectly synching up with their IRL movements like a real-time DVD commentary track.
If not every Contemporary Color piece resonated on the same emotional level, each at least yielded a wonderfully WTF, once-in-a-lifetime moment. Like the sight of platinum-plated Canadian diva Nelly Furtado belting out the glossy Nineties R&B of “World Premiere” with disco infiltrator Devonté Hynes and art-funk eccentric Merrill Garbus (a.k.a. Tune-Yards) amid a fireworks-like explosion of streamers. Or How to Dress Well’s Tom Krell unleashing his intensely atmospheric soul balladry while a team from Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, in glittery cat suits scurried across a siren-illuminated, blood-splattered floor pattern as if reenacting some Eighties rock video. Or a white-cloaked Zola Jesus channeling her inner Sinéad on the aptly named big-tent anthem “Something Beautiful” (co-written by its originally scheduled singer, Kelis) as Syracuse, New York’s Brigadeers dance elegantly through rows of diagonally arranged benches. There was also the closest thing we’ll get to a Beastie Boys reunion in 2015, with a bass-toting Adam Horovitz and long-time sideman Money Mark offsetting the austere, black-and-grey outfits of a Somerville, New Jersey, squad with the kaleidoscopic space-prog waltz “Quattro Mentos.”
But despite its dramatic shifts in tone, the 100-minute Contemporary Color flowed with the easy fluidity of a compact 10-song album. In service to this continuity, Byrne didn’t even grant himself top billing, performing his fiery, tiki-torched ballad “I Was Changed” in the penultimate slot with Quebecois crew Les Eclipses, while ceding show-closing honors to Tune-Yards’ bizarro robo-clown operetta “Beautiful Mechanical.” And when all the color guard ensembles congregated for the show’s grand flag-waving finale, there was no special spotlight bow for the white-haired man who put it all together; he was having too much fun dancing with the kids on the floor to the band’s disco outro. As the color guard crews made their way to the backstage area, Byrne stepped off to the side to let them shuffle through the corridor, like a proud coach who just needed a moment to come down from the high of a win. And for Byrne, that victory is nothing to shake a saber at: he just transformed a big-city arena into a small-town gymnasium, where the rowdiest hoots and hollers came not from the star-gazers in the crowd, but the friends and families cheering on their team.
Contemporary Color will be staged again tonight (June 23th) at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto, and at the Barclay Center in Brooklyn, New York, on June 27th and 28th.