[progdirjim(Admin)]

Saw Naikaku (Japan) and Flor De Loto (Peru) earlier today. Naikaku features a female flautist, as well as (male) bass, drums, guitar, keys. The guitar sound has a fair amount of crunch, so picture a more aggressive Tull, and you'll have an idea of their sound. All instrumental. The flautist was petite, and dressed in a traditional Japanese silk dress/kimono. Looking at her, you never would have predicted the aggressive way she played the flute. One song that didn't feature any flute drifted uncomfortably close to Dream Theater territory for me. The band was young and energetic, even emotive on the stage. One song had no keyboards, and some of the jamming included perhaps the funniest thing I've ever seen on stage. While the bass and guitar are jamming towards each other, heads bobbing in time with the music, the keyboardist is eating a bowl of rice with chopsticks, head bobbing to the music. It's hard to describe, but take my word for it, it was hilarious. After he finished the rice (he turned the bowl upside down to show us), he was air drumming with the chopsticks. An enjoyable show, and we have their album "Shell" on the Moon, give it a listen. Second band was Flor de Loto, featuring bass, drums, guitar and a gentleman dressed in some kind of native american garb with an elaborate headpiece who played flute, ethnic percussion and transverse flute. Their music had a nice mix of prog and ethnic (Latin) sound to it, quite interesting. I picked up their CD for the Moon. The guitarist added a lot of texture to the music, and he could shred (and did so on a few occasions). The other nice part about all of the Bajaprog afternoon shows is that they're outside, and they serve $1.50 tacos and $2.00 beers. I found myself standing next to Thijs Van Leer (from Focus) a few times, and we chatted about the preponderance of flutes this year - 3 of 5 acts featured flute prominently, and a fourth (Univers Zero) featured 2 wind instrument players. I'm off to the evening session in a few, more later.