On Sunday night, October 18, I drove up to San Francisco to see the Adrian Belew Power Trio at Slim’s. I was alone – my usual concert-attending buddies were all unable to come. But as it turned out, I ran into my sister-in-law April, her husband Ted, Ted’s brother Charles, and three other friends that they had come along with… so it turned into a party.

The opening act was a interesting acoustic guitar duet going by the name of Lapdance Armageddon.

Shortly after, Belew and his cronies came out on stage – the siblings Eric and Julie Slick on drums and bass respectively. The story of how he found the Slicks and came to employ them is interesting – here’s a 2008 interview with Belew where he talks about it.

The music was wonderful, full of power and delicacy, dissonance and consonance, chaos and precision – sometimes all at once. Much of the show was taken up by bits of the new release e. On Belew’s blog there’s a good summary of what e is all about.

This was the first time I’ve seen Belew in his own setting since the early 90’s (though I’ve seen him a couple of times this decade with King Crimson).