Ed Motta
With a new album named after and based around late 70s and early 80s AOR music, the highly-respected Brazilian led his slick band from behind his Fender Rhodes on his first show in Brighton. With so many ex-pats in attendance the between-song banter was mostly in Portuguese and the first hour was filled with incredible dance music heavily influenced by Stevie Wonder and Roy Ayers and filtered through Azymuth-flavoured arrangements. Unfortunately the mood changed when Motta, clearly upset, reprimanded the disrespectful groups of people ignoring the music, threatening to end the show. Fortunately, he continued and more Deodata-like delights followed. People! Shhh.
Studio Theatre, Brighton Dome, 9 April 2014
Rating:
Steve Clements
As commented above, the event was marred by Ed’s annoyance with the audience – which, to be honest, was probably due to him taking time out (often up to 10 minutes a go every 2 or 3 songs) to speak Portuguese with the Brazilians in the crowd. At little short sighted of him to think the non Portuguese speaking audience wouldn’t get a bit fed up with this and start talking amongst themselves instead.
Musically, it was good, although rather derivative. Clearly, he’d been listening to Steely Dan’s Gaucho on heavy-rotation whilst writing his ‘AOR’ album, amongst some other popular tracks from that era, like Christopher Cross’s ‘Sailing’. However, this is something he was transparent about which will no doubt meet with some agreeable, fresher ears than my (older) jaded ones.