If there’s any band out there that will make you go out on a school night and shake it, its Fort Collins based Euforquestra. Hell, I was running a fever that night and dragged my ass down to the party. Unfortunately I missed the first opening act Boom Chicken and most of Jet Edison’s set. However, I did manage to catch the last couple of songs by J.E., the last of which was a killer cover of “Sledgehammer” by Peter Gabriel, complete with guest players Ryan Jeter and Austin Zalatel from Euforquestra, on tenor and alto sax, respectively.
After a short break, Jeter and Zalatel reemerged on the stage with all seven members of their global dance music squad. With Euforquestra you get a diverse range of dance-inducing world music. They serve up a mixture of funk, reggae, afrobeat, rock n roll, dub and traditional sounds from all around the world, and never seem to have an idle fan anywhere on the dance floor. The horns, meshed with a plethora of percussion, tight rhythms and the guitar and keyboard meanderings of Mike Tallman and Matt Wright simply explode from the get go and the boys seem to play like the apocalypse will happen at any second and they want to die doing what they do best, overdoing it, even.
Opening with “Medicine Bow Run” off The Adventures of Glen Devey (2005) and “If We Could Go,” they next broke it down with a slick cover of “Get Up Off that Thing” by James Brown and on to the blues jam “Hopscotch.” The afrobeat sensation “Ochun” segued into an instrumental sample of “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” by Pink Floyd. Whether these guys are pulling from their quiver of original tunes or doing justice to any of the number of covers they do, one thing is for damn sure- if you can manage to find an audience member who is not shaking it like they mean it, you should probably check them for a pulse.
Setlist (incomplete): Medicine Bow Run, If We Could Go, Get Up off That Thing, Hopscotch, Road Funk, Hang Up on Your Hang-ups, 2007, Ochun, Shine on You Crazy Diamond, Soup, Feel Together, Tramba, Life During Wartime
