The Macpodz

continued

The Blind Pig crowd dances, bobs, and claps, led into the music by long introductions that add layers of rhythm as a piece develops. The beat can go from disco to rock to funk to the place where soul and rock rhythms met in the early 1970s in the music of Sly and the Family Stone, and some of the music veers into irregular meters. The crowd isn't fazed. "If

you can get the time signature of that, you win a prize," says one band member, keeping the crowd physically engaged with funk bandleader calls like "I want everybody in the place to get real low."

Over the rhythms go jazz lines from trumpet, keyboards, and occasionally flute. The harmonies are dense, the rhythms angular, the tone sharp and edgy. The jazz element is serious: this isn't jazz improvisation slipped in around the edges of dance music, but fast, furious stuff. This band challenges its audiences while making them dance, and that hasn't happened for a while, either.

To pull that off, the group inserts doses of retro sounds. A parade of 1970s effects goes by in the music, awakening immediate recognition in anyone who was around to hear them