November 17, 2001

Spectacle is standard. The intro jam sounds like it might have part missing, but judged on what is available there isn’t much reason to not skip this. This is followed by a track called “Barber’s Broken String Jam,” which should be heard actually. Some awesome Barber banter, and some solid jazz jamming. The Shimmy jam is a pretty standard mid-tempo vehicle. It remains in the major mode up until and through the segue into the tempo breakdown that signals the segue into Bazaar Escape. Bazaar Escape is jammed out of the modern jam section (a la 4/4/01, and for the first time since then). It begins as a rager, and breaks down suddenly at 11:20. The jam settles into an up-tempo, minor-key trance vehicle, which builds in intensity as it reaches Shimmy. Excellent, breakneck trance. Shimmy has another outro jam, this one quickly settling into mellow bliss. Around the six minute mark, the jam returns to dnb, and the remainder is a steady build into the end of Bazaar Escape. Jigsaw Earth has a very light and airy trance jam with Magner using a flute patch, and the dub jam is the typical raging 01 fare, but both are too short to do much interesting.

“Too short to do much interesting,” in fact, seems to be the theme of the second set. It opens with the debuts of King of the World and Sister Judy’s Soul Shack, the one jamless and the other close enough to it. Ladies has an energetic Barber-led jam without much coherence to the theme until around the 7 minute mark, when he hits on a great repeating riff building to the ending. Helicopters is sad. Setting aside the fact that a standalone Helicopters should never have a 7 minute timestamp, this is the first version to contain the framework for what would become Bionic Helix (not so named until 2017), the composed jam present in every version of Helicopters played from 12/31/01 to 10/31/03. There is zero jam outside of that framework in this version. Munchkin has a very enjoyable type one bliss theme, and is overall probably the highlight of the set. Magellan is just about the only song in the set that feels long enough to do anything, and of course it doesn’t. I was hopeful for Lai, as there were a few strong versions in the fall, but this one is pretty unremarkable, as is the B&C encore.

2/5. The Bazaar > Shimmy > Bazaar scrapes the second star, but the second set is particularly dull.

Stray Observations: The show features the debuts of King of the World (based on the 5/6/99 Pygmy jam) and Sister Judy’s Soul Shack (based on the Maui Project original, No Matter).