Oddisee & Good Company at the Jazz Cafe

So if you haven’t heard of Oddisee and his band Good Company you really need to do some research.

Oddisee has been around for years now, I first heard of him in Lo Budget Crew with Kev Brown and Kenn Starr (and many others) as a rapper and producer at the time.

Then Oddisee started putting music out solo from 04/05 maybe from my memory.  His 2006 release “Foot in the Door” which was mixed by the infamous DJ Jazzy Jeff seemed to really put him out there in my eyes.

At this point I knew he was someone to watch out for and would look out for his instrumental releases and features over the years. However what really caught me was his full label (not major) debut album People Hear What They See released in 2012.

It was like nothing I’d heard at the time, full of live instrumentation and samples. Bearing in mind this is a producer that was heavily steeped in sampling and to hear this evolution was just something else. Oddisee has been prolific production and feature wise whether it was his original Lo Budget crew, working with the likes of Little Brother, Jean Grae, Jazzy Jeff, J-Live onto his band Good Company.

Anyway’s that’s enough of my introduction onto last nights events.

Last night at the Jazz Cafe was a lively affair. The warm up DJ was Eric Lau who some of you may have (should have) heard of.

Great producer and DJ, also collaborated with Oddisee and many other artists previously. Now he played some dope! S*** this guy was dropping instrumentals of Bilal, Karriem Riggins etc before dropping some real Dilla beats. Including one track that I’ve never heard throughout my online searching which sounded like it could have been one of the infamous Voodoo white labels with Q Tip starting to rap at the end of it and D’angelo just vibing through out the beat.

As the DJ said “you can’t shazam this” smh.

There was a UK warm up group that went by the name of Granville Sessions. They did a nice little set, great band, very entertaining performance and a great song bomb (we got that) with a few other good songs . They definitely amped up the crowd you can find their bandcamp here: https://granvillesessions.bandcamp.com/

As usual the band Good Company started off playing some jazzy/break beat type ish before Oddisee stepped up on the stage ready to bat.

Oddisee and the band covered tracks from his debut album People Hear What They See, his project Tangible Dream and the latest album The Good Fight. Covering songs from all of these projects is important to the experience as you can see how his sound evolved over the years.

Oddisee started out the show with “Ready to Rock” off of People Hear What They See, real party rocking vibe and got everyone going.

He proceeded to rip through “Killing time” and “Yeah Nah” off of Tangible Dream to lead into “The Going’s On”, one of my favourite Oddisee tracks ever.

This song has such a vibe to it, sampling the what’s going on vocals with the soulful keys and vocals of Ralph Real behind it. To hear this song live was just something else man.

Had to split this into two parts as second part has a real soulful break down that you don’t want to miss

From there he jumped into his hit single “That’s Love” from the good fight album, throwing in some fun crowd interaction and had everyone feeling the “goodness” as Eric Lau said from the get go.

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One thing you are guaranteed at an Oddisee show is energy from the performers and just as much energy coming back from the crowd. From my experience very few rappers know how to really connect with a crowd and get them moving, Oddisee is definitely one of these few.

Oddisee flexed his singing chops for the next song First Choice and had the crowd singing along as usual. Typical tight performance from artist and band.

From here he tore through a few more cuts from The Good Fight, namely Counter Clockwise with its 5/4 time signature that had everyone stuttering while trying to nod their heads to the beat, Contradictions Maze and Book Covers.

Second to last was “I Meant it When I Said It” which in my opinion is the best track on the album, Oddisee and Good Company hyped the crowd into a house party vibe with choruses of Ayyy Ayyy Ayyy throughout the song.

At this point it was supposedly the last song of the night and as Oddisee put so eloquently ” we supposed to go upstairs like our sets done let you cheer and blow up our egos. But lets skip all the bull**** and just do another song for Y’all”

The last song  “Worse Before Better” was another collaboration with UK rapper Tranquil who has been on a few Oddisee tracks now.

The band switched up the vibe with this song and put a real reggae vibe which was a fitting end to the show.

I was personally a little bit disappointed the show didn’t last longer but I’d say we got an amazing 60-70 minute performance from Oddisee and the band which is something rare to see in a live hip hop show nowadays.

Oddisee is an artist that I couldn’t recommend any more and I’ve turned a lot of my friends/family onto his music and hopefully this write up puts more people onto him and gives you part of the experience of an Oddisee and Good Company show.

Writing like this is a new thing for me and I’m learning so bare with me, I’m hoping to post more often with reviews of albums, gigs and also just my thoughts on music, gaming and films in general.

Enjoy People!