Spearheaded by a new band with plenty of nods to their classic soul roots (Fishbone) and a reconstituted funk legend (Parliament-Funkadelic), ia2000 kicked off with panache at the Players Ball Sunday night in the Venetian Hotel's C2K Club.
The atmosphere was both far less packed and far less tense than it had been for Saturday night's party following the AVN Adult Video Awards (A2K) ceremonies, when patrons complained often and angrily about club bouncers' heavy-handedness. This time, perhaps in part because of a far smaller but no less festive crowd, the bouncers kept it light and the music kept it heated.
As he had for the Players Ball during last September's ia2000 in Miami Beach, hip-hop superstar Ice T hosted the party, presenting YNot with memberships to the Players Club for outstanding adult Internet achievement last year.
YNot spokesman Rick Muenyong still seemed a little surprised by it Monday morning. "I don't know what the whole thing's all about," he says, "but it's mainly an Internet achievement award kind of thing. And yeah, it's really nice, it was a good idea."
Fishbone led off the music with a rousing set which veered between contemporary R and B and classic soul-revue style music, punctuated by a horn section featuring a trumpeter playing a tiny "pocket trumpet" of the kind jazz great Don Cherry once played in the original, groundbreaking Ornette Coleman Quartet which pioneered so-called "free jazz".
At times, the band seemed to lose its moorings, but at plenty of other times they recaptured their sensibilities, especially when, as in several numbers, they shifted tempos as if challenging dancers and themselves equally. Their humor was unforced and, despite a few problems with C2K's acoustics, they sustained a high-enough energy level and several arresting musical passages from the horns.
But it was the reconstituted Parliament-Funkadelic which put the most dancers on the floor. The 1970s funk legends, led by George Clinton, weren't quite as explosive as in their heyday of "the Mothership", and it was obvious that the edgy, rangy bass work of original member Bootsy Collins was too much missing from the current incarnation.
But it didn't keep the dancers from rolling with it, and the band ripped through a number of their better selections, including (and especially) their classic "Tear The Roof Off". For the most part, the ensemble kept it warm and tight and rippling, the riffing holding steady, Clinton in better voice than he'd been in a very long time, the rhythm section holding steady, and the special sonic effects kept within sensible boundaries.
It may not have been the original Mothership itself, but the resurrected P-Funk gave a fair enough showing as to why a lot of people went into mourning when disco turned firm funk into assembly-line escapism.
