Banyan - Live @ Perkins Palace

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Sanctuary Records to Release Banyan's Live at Perkins Palace on October 12, 2004

Jane's Addiction Drummer Leads Dream Team Cast of Music Veterans Including Mike Watt and Nels Cline in Experimental Beat-Worshiping New Album

If rock stars were superheroes Banyan's ferocious new full length, Live At Perkins Palace (out October 12 on Sanctuary Records), would be the stuff of comic book collecting fantasies. Over the course of their previous two full-length albums (1997's Banyan, and 1999's Anytime At All), Jane's Addiction's resident skin pounding guru, Stephen Perkins, lead a rotating cast of a veritable who's who in California's collaboration happy music scene. Banyan seemed to consist of everybody from eccentric beat junkies like Money Mark and the Dust Brothers, to Chili Peppers' Flea and John Frusciante, to critically acclaimed Lou Reed collaborating bassist Rob Wasserman.

For Live At Perkins Palace, though, Perkins wanted to try and capture the very essence of Banyan's ambitious live experience. In doing so, he trimmed the group's far-reaching lineup down to its four core members. This time around Banyan consists of former Minute Men bassist and low-frequency iconoclast, Mike Watt handling bass duties, Wilco's current ghost-birthing guitarist, Nels Cline, one-time Death Row records session musician, Willie Waldman on trumpet, and, of course, Jane's Addiction's tribal rhythm provider, Stephen Perkins, holding it all together on the kit.

The results are equal parts breathtaking and booty shaking. For a group named after an Indian fig tree whose roots can encompass over an acre of land, Live At Perkins Palace is remarkably free of the indulgences that have claimed many a side project casualty. This is definitely virtuosic stuff, but Banyan seek to move your body just as much as your mind. Perkins attacks the kit like he studied under modern beat-scientists like DJ Shadow and RJD2 just as much as jazz pioneers like Art Blakey, and Mike Watt's pugnacious bass lines still resonate with the same tongue and cheek flair that he has built a career on. Furthermore, Nels Cline's reedy guitar abstractions frolic like kindergarteners at recess with Waldman's frenetic trumpet stabs making sure that the high end of the mix is cooked to perfection. And it all sounds so easy.

Banyan will be bringing this incarnation of itself to a city near you in support of Live At Perkins Palace. Playing with the band for these dates will be abstract trapezoidal-painter, Norton Wilson, live on stage. Yes, they're playing with a painter. 'Nuff Said. 

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Play Banyan " Mad As A Hornet" Sorry - Windows Media Player Only, will play in the latest real player or MusicMatch as well.