Ozomatli

Glastonbury Festival 2000 reviews

Ozomatli
Jazzworld Stage
22:50 Sunday 25th June 2000

Right. It's Sunday night at the end of a wicked Glastonbury, who am I going to see? The choice boils down to two: the musical revelation of last year that is Ozomatli's musical gumbo; or the legendary David Bowie, who's been stuck in a creative rut since 'Let's Dance'. Chali 2na versus The Thin White Duke. The future versus the past. Well I've never been one for nostalgia, so it was nuts to Bowie and off to the Jazzworld for me.

Ozomatli are a major label anomaly - a boundary crossing band with roots in every American ethnic group whose music refuses to be pigeonholed. With a nine piece band playing every kind of Latin rhythm, one of LA's most distinctive emcees in Chali 2na from the Jurassic 5 and scratching and cutting on most of their tracks, they are unique. Their recorded music displays all the influences you'd expect in a band whose members have roots all over Central and North America, but hail from LA - that total latin sound, full of soul and yet laced with a funky hiphop edge that Los Angeles has infused into their music. I was expecting a lot from them live and boy, did they deliver.

Ozomatli started their set in exactly the same way as last year in the dance tent - hidden amongst the crowd before suddenly starting to play their instruments and wending their way onto the stage. Automatically the crowd pushed forward to see more and people were already starting to move when the opening bars of 'Como Ves' kicked in, and it only got funkier for the rest of their set, as they reworked most of the tracks from their eponymous album, including the singles 'Cumbia de los Muertos' and 'Superbowl Sundae'. Their usual DJ, Cut Chemist, was strangely absent, but his replacement, Obi Wan Spinobi, was more than adequate, despite his slightly wack name, and his cutting was a constant feature. The band members, all seemingly totally comfortable with an array of instruments as well as the singing duties, looked like they had been playing together for 20 years, despite the fact that they only have one album under their belts. The star of the show, but only by a margin, was Chali 2na. The loose-limbed rapper was an awesome spectacle, throwing his rangy body all over the stage in a non stop blaze of energy, hyping the crowd, dropping his throaty old-skool rhymes over the latin beats and grinning all the way through. This was what makes live music so wicked - seeing a band enjoy the crowd as much as the crowd is them. And there could be no doubt that they were having fun - they were getting us to chant along, putting all their efforts into making sure everone had a good time, and after a climactic finish when Chali 2na, having debated it for nearly 10 minutes, finally leapt off stage for a bit of crowd surfing, the entire band reassembled in amongst the Glasto punters. There, they treated us to an impromptu half hour of percussion and singing as they wandered around the Jazzworld field, leading the crowd and getting us to sing the Sesame Street theme song with them.

As they finally gave up, having rocked Glastonbury for the second year in a row,and I drifted off to find my mates, I knew I'd made the right choice.