Concert Review: Fishbone Summerstage 2000

The following New York Times concert review of Fishbone at Summer Stage in Central Park ran in 2000.

POP REVIEW; An All-Embracing Sound To Cheer the Distressed

By JON PARELES

Published: July 10, 2000

If there is one impulse shared across African-American music, it is the determination to convert tribulation into good-time music. That impulse links blues and calypso, reggae and rumba, and it takes hyperactive form with Fishbone, which headlined Central Park Summerstage on Saturday afternoon.

From its beginnings in the late 1970's, Fishbone has been a breathtakingly ambitious band, and one that knocks itself out to entertain an audience. Its songs are not only eager to address the ills of everyone from hapless lovers to victims of nuclear attack but also to sum up American (and Jamaican) party music from the swing era onward.

Angelo Moore, Fishbone's lead singer and saxophonist, sang about ''AIDS and Armageddon'' over chomping, ratcheting New Orleans funk verses with a reggae chorus; ''Karma Tsunami'' was a frenetic mixture of gospel, ska, punk and two-beat. Not all his concerns were global; he also bemoaned a failed marriage to the bouncy reggae of ''Suffering'' and ogled Spandex contours in a ska tune, ''Where'd You Get Those Pants.'' All four songs were from Fishbone's current album, ''The Psychotic Friends Nuttwerx'' (Hollywood).

While the core of Fishbone's music is revved-up Jamaican ska, its set also touched on progressive rock, hip-hop and jump-blues, not to mention funk variants from Detroit and Minneapolis. Mr. Moore threw in a Little Richard falsetto whoop and some Sly Stone growls. He also bounded across the stage, recited poetry, mugged like a born comedian and launched himself into the happily moshing crowd.

Despite lineup changes through the years -- including the replacement of its founding drummer, Fish, by John Steward -- Fishbone still tears through its songs like a band jamming in a garage, then reveals its precision with an instantaneous stop or a sudden jump into a different style. Its career timing hasn't been as good. It was too early for the California ska revival that it anticipated, and it has remained too eclectic, and too raunchy, for most commercial radio stations. But onstage Fishbone is still an all-American underdog, playing its musical erudition and serious ideas for very knowing laughs.

The Persuasions, who opened the concert, are a five-man a capella group that has been singing together for 37 years. Their roots are in doo-wop and its antecedent, gospel quartet singing; they usually place three-part harmony between Jimmy Hayes's subterranean, nonsense-syllable bass lines and Jerry Lawson's exhortatory baritone leads.

Through the years concerts by the Persuasions have relied on 1950's oldies, but they have lately moved their timeline forward. They recently released ''Frankly a Cappella'' (Earthbeat), an album of songs by Frank Zappa, whose label released the first Persuasions album in 1970, and they have recorded an album of Grateful Dead songs to be released in October. Onstage they repatriated both Zappa's infuriated cynicism and the Dead's frontier romance to the three-chord warmth of doo-wop.

DJ Swamp, a turntablist who is now in Beck's band, played a solo set with two turntables and a laptop. He scratched records, and sometimes just the needle itself, to make chirrups, whistles, shivers, whooshes, scrapes and hard-rock chords. He rapped along with his own scratching, boasting that now, ''Everybody wants to be a D.J.,'' but ''it takes more than your mom buying two Technics, you geek.'' He delivered precise bursts of sound while controlling discs with his nose or his elbows (as he played the word ''elbow'' repeatedly). It was like a latter-day vaudeville act: geeky showmanship for both eyes and ears.