He’s the common thread linking Kendrick Lamar, Erykah Badu, questing jazz revivalist Kamasi Washington and even thrash legends Suicidal Tendencies; a crack sessioneer and serious muso, which you could probably guess by the plush six-stringed Ibanez bass strapped high to his chest, like BB King’s beloved Lucille. (It draws hushed coos admiring its “fret width” from some corners of the audience.) And as befits a player of his chops – backed by the similarly impressive talents of keyboardist Dennis Hamm and blur-limbed drummer Justin Brown – Stephen Bruner, AKA Thundercat, often feels compelled to take his haunting, playful pop songs on ear-opening detours for minutes at a time.
These extended passages of tempo-juggling jazz odyssey hover within that nexus between prog and fusion, echoing 70s groups such as Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, the Tony Williams Lifetime, whose fevered improvisations reached for spiritual ecstasies. Bruner’s concerns are more earthbound, but perhaps more profound; his latest album, Drunk, is a sprawling, sad and funny suite of songs exploring the alienation, melancholy and excess of life as a touring musician, haunted by the regret and longing of a morning-after.
“Show us your tits!” shouts a member of the audience. “Show us your mom’s tits,” snaps back the grinning Bruner who, sporting micro-dreads, a moustache-nuzzling septum-piercing and a smock-like white top, looks sort of angelic. “I don’t give a shit any more,” he continues. “It’s been a long tour.”
Certainly, the trio play with the kind of dizzying telepathy you can only develop over months on the road, Brown in particular taking off in wild directions suggesting where 4 Hero’s interstellar drum’n’bass might have led next. But at no point do they seem to lose or baffle the audience; their freakouts – Bruner’s hands like spiders over the strings, Brown’s time signatures more complex than the Gaussian Integral – not indulgent but gripping, and anchored by the deep, slippery feelings the songs evoke.
For while on stage, Bruner is all beatific bonhomie and love for London. But his songs are private, intimate, inhabiting the same confessional space Brian Wilson located when he penned In My Room, as he cuts a Charlie Brown-esque figure roaming broken-hearted about the hotel corridors of his synth-funk and yachtpop threnodies. “Sometimes you are dead inside / Sometimes it’s OK / Sometimes it’s the worst thing ever,” he sings on DUI, his high-register vocal sounding like the Marvin Gaye of his humbled, heartbroken divorce album Here, My Dear, the melody something timeless and inconsolable like a Sinatra weepie.
It’s not all wild excursions and cosmic bummers. Captain Stupido is so wildly, loosely funky it sounds like it was made out of rubber bands, while Oh Sheit It’s X imagines Daryl Hall fronting Parliament to narrate an MDMA adventure, boasting a monster “I just wanna party” hookline. But it’s the other strings to Bruner’s bow – his mercurial flights of improvisation, his aching, introspective songcraft – that mark him out as a singular talent.
