An interesting weekend musically, all the way from cerebral to visceral. We went to see Herbie Hancock on Friday at the Orpheum in Phoenix. If you haven’t seen a show at the Orpheum, you really should, the ambience is great, the acoustics are top notch, and the theater was rebuilt in the 90s so the infrastructure is sound.

Herbie Hancock was great, doing tunes from Watermelon Man up to selections from his latest album of Joni Mitchell songs. He had a couple of synths, a grand piano, multiple computers and his Roland jam-like-a-guitarist keyboard, which was quite fun. The band was Herbie Hancock, west-African guitarist Lionel Loueke, Vinnie Colaiuta on percussion, Nathan East on bass, and an appearance from extremely young vocalist Sonya Kitchell. Herbie was astonishing as expected, but Nathan East was a standout, playing fat 6-string bass and electric upright. He was always tight and always right. Lionel Loueke did a very interesting solo song, b-boxing a west-African song and singing beautifully, accompanying himself on what looked to be a Godin Multiac – beautiful guitar, that.

From there to the So You Think You Can Dance Tour 2007, full of very short spots, really young people with astonishing athletic bodies doing gymnastic and enthusiastic dance numbers. Herbie’s show was loose and stretched out, the Dance tour was canned and planned every step of the way. This show was at the Jobing.Com arena in Glendale. Good sound system, lots of lighting effects with strobes and giant TV screens, topped off with confetti and streamers in the finale. There was a lot of good music that I would just get into and then the dance would be over, way too abruptly in my opinion. Men were outnumbered about 4 to 1 in the audience, and I would estimate that tweener girls held the mode measure.

To get into the arena for the Dance tour, I had to go through a metal detector. My Swiss Army pocket knife did not pass muster, I had to take it back to the car. Lord only knows what kind of killing spree I might have gone on, what with all that estrogen in the air. Women’s purses were just passed around the detectors and cursorily glanced at, so we could have smuggled an army’s worth of guns in if we wanted to – or the mighty 2-inch blade I nearly got in with. The story of America today – extra procedures that inconvenience harmless people, do nothing to provide actual protection to anybody, and give some people the feeling that they’re important and powerful (the employees, not the attendees).