Three Fantastic Live Performances on KEXP

...exactly what it says on the tin.

Note: this article is close to a year old, but for some reason I never tried to finish and post it until now. It’s still accurate and (I hope) good, though! Have a read, and get ready for a flurry of new content over the coming weeks/months/next year.

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One of the best YouTube channels out there for people interested in alternative/indie music is the channel of Seattle-based radio station KEXP. Back in the mid-80s (as a volunteer-run University-based station called KCMU) they were at the centre of the developing “Seattle Sound”, helping to break a lot of key grunge bands into the scene (very significantly, their airplay helped in getting Soundgarden signed!), and to this day, they remain ardent supporters of local music and alternative music. They were among the first stations to pioneer online broadcasting, and most importantly for us, they’ve been on YouTube since 2006. Nowadays, I feel like much of their traffic and revenue comes from YouTube (I can’t be certain, mind you, but they have a lot of very popular performances there), and they consistently post visiting bands’ full sets (often with interview components) with truly excellent audio quality¹ and tasteful videography. So, for today’s post, I’ve decided to tell you a little bit about three performances that I highly recommend from their YouTube channel:

1. Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio (warm-up set, recorded May 2017, uploaded Jun. 2017)

2. black midi (full performance, recorded Nov. 2018, uploaded Jan. 2019)

3. Mdou Moctar (full performance, recorded Aug. 2022, uploaded Sep. 2022)

These are in no particular order, although I’m going through them chronologically.

1. Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio

Nowadays, I’ll be the first to acknowledge that organ trio music is really awesome. My moment of realisation, though, was seeing this warm-up set that the Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio played on KEXP:

This band features Delvon Lamarr on organ, Jimmy James on guitar and Dave McGraw on drums. This iteration of the band is probably my favourite, especially because of Jimmy, who’s probably my favourite contemporary rock and soul guitarist. I follow him on Instagram, where it’s obvious that his knowledge of this niche of guitar playing is encyclopaedic and his practice is dedicated. (He and Dave are also founding members of the larger Seattle-based soul ensemble the True Loves, and he regularly performs with a wide variety of other soul and rock projects in the Pacific Northwest, and further afield.)

That’s not to take away from Delvon or Dave, mind you, who are equally as important to the sound of this performance. Delvon’s basslines and accompaniment playing are solid as a rock, and lock in really nicely with Dave’s almost delicately understated drumming. The band also played another full set on KEXP on this same day, which is also fantastic, and these two sets were packaged into a commercially released album, Live at KEXP!, which you can listen to here:

Both sets (but, in my opinion, particularly this first warm-up set) are full of this relaxed chemistry and groove that’s just so fun to listen to. The song choices and compositions are excellent, and the soloing is phenomenal. It’s not quite jazz, but it’s very close, and I suspect it might serve as a good introduction into jazz conventions and/or instrumental improvisation for people who haven’t explored those styles of music before. My personal favourite tune from this set is their rendition of Curtis Mayfield’s “Move On Up”.

2. black midi

Before they very deservedly became the alternative mega-phenom/indie darlings that they are today, black midi showed up on my YouTube feed in early 2019. At the time they hadn’t yet released an album, I’d never heard of them, and most of their songs didn’t even have names, but I saw that Adam Neely had commented positively on this performance, so I had to give it a watch. (I was a different person at the time – don’t judge, please.) And, I mean, just listen for yourself:

This is some of the most unbelievably tight, loose, crazy, nerdy, nutty rock and/or roll you’ll ever hear. These tunes all showed up on their debut album Of Schlagenheim (2019), which is definitely a fantastic record, but in this live context they’re just that little bit more gritty and off-the-wall. This is also a great representation of how the band sounded in their original quartet form (before guitarist Matt Kwasniewski-Kelvin left the band in 2021). My personal highlight has to be the first track (now entitled “Near DT, MI”), which is about the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. It’s quite a harrowing tune, given the lyrical content, and it showcases Morgan Simpson’s fantastic drumming (which is where much of the band’s paradoxical loose tightness/tight looseness comes from, in my opinion). This performance really has to be heard to be believed.

3. Mdou Moctar

One of my favourite live acts of all time is Mdou Moctar, a Nigerien group whom I first heard through a different live performance on their own YouTube channel. I’d heard some of this style of music – called tishoumaren/assouf (and sometimes labelled as desert/Saharan blues or Tuareg rock) – before, but I’d never really delved that deeply into the sound. This clip, though, was mesmerising. The grooves were expansive and delicate, but also infectious and fiery. I began passively following the band, until I found this clip:

What followed was an intense month or so where I almost exclusively listened to their music, and was fortunate enough to catch them performing at WOMADelaide in 2023. If you ever get the chance to, it’s so very much extremely worth seeing them perform live. Their studio recordings are excellent (and it’s super interesting hearing interviews where Mikey Coltun, the bassist and primary recording engineer/producer for the band, explains his approach to capturing their live feel), but their chemistry as performers is just so undeniable that you have to see it for yourself if you possibly can. In particular, the track “Afrique Victime” – whether it be on the record, in this live clip, or in a concert – has a visceral power to it that few songs I’ve ever heard have matched.

The End

That’s it! I hope you’ve enjoyed my little tribute to KEXP and their fantastic YouTube channel. Check them out, and why not subscribe to them to help support weird/cool music? You can subscribe to me too, if you feel like it:

OK, Goodbye for now!

1. I really mean this – the audio capture is impossibly good. (Sometimes it even surpasses the band’s actual albums in terms of sheer accuracy to their sound.)