live @ the Garage 4.16.2000
New York City turntablist DJ Logic calls his current outfit, Project Logic, “ a work in mad progress” and that was a good description of what his far-ranging and inventive set at the Garage Sunday night felt like.
Logic (aka Jason Kibler) raised his profile considerably during his recent collaborations with genre blurring trio Medeski, Martin and Wood, but he has been exploring turntable tactics since his days as a founder of the Black Rock Coalition in the late 80s. The most striking thing about the nearly two-hour set was Logic’s fluid, lyrical turntable work. In his skilled hands, the tables became a multi-voiced force, issuing feedback, jumpy cut-ups or liquid melodic phrases.
The crack band--drummer Eric Paul, bassist Scott Palmer, keyboardist Mike Whitman and Casey Benjamin, who handled sax, flute and keys--didn’t really play Project Logic’s songs, instead they used them as guideposts for long, twisting flights that began as jazz speckled hip-hop and splayed in myriad directions. “Flat as Aboard”, for example, began as it does on the group’s eponymous album, then grew exponentially to accommodate Witeman’s squiggly, burbling soloing; a pair of other songs blossomed into dub.
When Benjamin’s sax took the melodic lead, the mood recalled Courtney Pine’s jazz and hip-hop hybrid “Modern Day Jazz Stories” and when Logic indicated a directional change with a simple glance at his band, they evoked a modal-jazz quintet. Much of the time, as during the delirious “JJ Bailey”, the surging groove was all that mattered, and the spontaneous dancing that broke out was the most accurate barometer of the impact of Logic’s substantial “mad progress."
Washington Post, April 2000
