Lewis Parker @ Higher Learning (The Toucan), Cardiff
After the slight disappoint of the last Higher Learning, I was counting on this to restore my confidence in the Cardiff scene. I mean what else could get a crowd going more than a UK legend and a local boy both playing on the same night? Still I wasn’t exactly in a hurry to make it through the doors as it tends to be fairly empty at the start.
When I did bowl up, it was indeed fairly dead. Luckily this time it filled up nice and fast thanks to the good selection of tunes being played by Killer Tomato. Certainly a nice old skool vibe with the choices, so Nas and all that went down good for me. The vibe was obviously quite buzzing already, with plenty of local support for Cardiff/Leeds boy, Humurak D Gritty. It was about that time of night for the open mic session, which a handful of hungry emcees taking up the challenge. Not an outstanding level of quality, but some of the blokes had a few interesting things to say. Still the crowd seemed to be paying attention so they must have been doing something right.
After a few more tunes being spun, Humurak and the Middle Eastern Artists stepped on stage. It was nice to see both Jammin and Blaktrix on stage with Humurak, as it added a little more depth to the performance. Humurak displayed as much energy as a 12 month year old puppy as usual, bouncing around the stage obviously loving every second of it. He also had some well funny battle rhymes to drop which put a nice large grin on my face. A good performance by him, but he was definitely at his best along side his fellow emcee Blaktrix, who impressed me a lot.
It wasn’t a long wait until the legendary Lewis Parker took the stage after a few tunes spun by his deejay, Caramac. What struck me straight away was Lewis Parkers confidence! I was under the impression he was more likely to stare at the floor and mumble, but instead seemed to be fairly buoyant. Some of his new stuff was played, like ‘It’s All Happening Now’, which was well received, seemed like a fair few people knew the words too which was cool. Still for me it was all about the old ‘Masquerades & Silhouettes’ stuff… when ‘101 Pianos’ came on, which happens to be one of my favourite tunes of all time, I was loving it. Again, to my surprise a large proportion of the crowd knew the words too. Even Lewis’s face seemed to look surprised at the amount of crowd participation. Finally we were treated to some new Lewis Parker tunes which were sounding nice for sure.
After that I had to make a bit of a sharp exit, so not sure what went down after that. Still, what I did catch was a vast improvement on last months poor showing. Both performances were worth the entrance fee so I was a happy man. The only negative comment I would have, was that from what I heard not much UK stuff was played like normal and no tunes for the bboys… but still seemed to me like everyone had a good night out.
- 2Hip | profile
Related Links:
© ukhh.com 1999 - 2003
