2004 We first saw Billy Bang at the Red Creek with the Sun Ra Arkestra in the late seventies. He has performed at the Village Gate atrium a few times in the last few years and he is always senational but he tore the roof off the place at Montage. His newest material is based on his Viet Nam experience and many of the new songs start with haunting Asian melodies and wind their way to wild peaks. The crowd was estatic. Billy Bang wins the "Best Of Show".

Check out Jeff Spevak's review from the D&C below.

Billy Bang Performs a Thunderous Set

By Jeff Spevak
Staff Music Critic, Democrat & Chronicle

(June 10, 2004) — A slim, distinguished-looking hipster, born in Alabama and raised in Harlem, Billy Bang was drafted by his country to fight in Vietnam.

On his first day on the job, they kicked him out of a helicopter and told him to crawl through a tunnel and shoot any Vietcong that he saw.

Thirty years later, how would that affect you?

Bang, the extraordinary violinist, responded with a remarkable album, Vietnam. He opened the first of two shows at Montage Grille on Wednesday night at the Rochester International Jazz Festival with a piece from that 2001 release, “Yo! Ho Chi Minh Is in the House.”

Introducing the song, Bang spoke of reconciliation, coming full circle, and events that came back around to feel like the past: “As soon as we got close,” he said of relations between the United States and Vietnam, “this Iraq broke out.”
”Yo! Ho Chi Minh Is in the House” began with Bang plucking the strings of his violin, alongside a delicate piano. The effect was quite Asian. Upright bass joined in; the cymbals played like rain falling on a sheet-metal roof.

The piece began to crescendo, with Bang bounding across the stage, sawing into his violin with bluegrass-punk velocity, the piano and bass quietly stepping aside without a break in the intensity, as fiddle and drum exploded.

Throughout the set, Bang could also be beautifully melodic, as in the Stuff Smith ‘30s ballroom-dance piece “Time Will Tell.” Going back to his days with Sun Ra, Bang did a piece he wrote for the space-jazz master, “Jupiter’s Future,” which included a piano solo by Andrew Bemkey that was as manic as the guy in Reefer Madness.

But “Yo! Ho Chi Minh Is in the House” was astonishing. Mind-blowing, and without question the finest, most exhilarating moment I’ve seen in six days of jazz here.