By Colin Aurelien
Jazz
Cafe, London - 24 January 2005
Monday saw Detroit rap group Slum Village play the second of their three-night residency at London’s Jazz Café. Doors at the famous haunt open at 7pm, although anyone who attended promptly expecting to see Slum Village had a further two and a half hours to wait. Over the next hour and a half, the Jazz Café audience would be indulged by an American size helping of Slum Village’s music, including unreleased material and tracks from their current album ‘Detroit Deli’, which has spawned the hit ‘Selfish’.
Over the
years, the Detroit group have gone through a state of flux in terms of
the group line up. On the first Slum Village album, ‘Fantastic Vol.2’,
the original line up was producer/rapper Jay
Dee, Baatin
and T3. By the time of their
second album, ‘Trinity (Past, Present and Future)’, which
included the hits ‘Tainted’ and ‘Disco’, Jay Dee
had left and been replaced by the emcee Elzhi. Now, Slum Village consists
of the duo T3 and Elzhi
after the departure of Baatin after the ‘Trinity’ album, which
was due to health reasons.
The intimate surroundings of the Jazz Café enabled Slum Village
to have an electrifying interaction with their audience. At one point,
T3 and Elzhi decided the audience was worthy enough to be introduced to
a new dance routine called the ‘Earl Flynt’, (basically putting
both hands out in front of you and rhythmically turning the palm so that
it was faced towards you one minute, and away the next. The audience however,
seemed happy enough to showcase their new Slum Village endorsed hand gesture.
Other highlights were the tribute paid to the late Ol’
Dirty Bastard, with whom they had worked with on the track
‘Dirty’, which features on the ‘Detroit Deli’
album. Slum Village’s performance of ODB’s tracks ‘Shimmy
Shimmy Ya’ and ‘N*gga Please’ had the audience in raptures.
Also thrown into the concert were a couple of freestyles along with a performance by T3, reminiscent of the track ‘Last Call’ taken from the Kanye West ‘College Dropout’ album. On the track, Kanye talks over a hip hop beat of how he got his record deal, which T3 emulated in a similar fashion, although this time improvising it to tell the story of how Slum Village came to be.
Stand out performances where undoubtedly ‘Tainted’, ‘Disco’, ‘Raise It Up’, ‘Reunion’ and ‘Selfish’, which was left right till the end. For anyone not familiar with ‘Selfish’, Slum Village’s latest hit pays homage to the female form. Just as in the ‘Selfish’ music video, T3 and Elzhi had no problems in hand picking the best women the Jazz Café had to offer, lifting them onto the stage as they performed the track, drawing a close to Slum Village’s second night of residency at the Jazz Cafe.
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