Gig Review | Echo Hotel Collective | Summerhall

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Last week’s Echo Hotel Collective gig was like watching a purple Lamborghini perform a solemn, 15-mph drive-by. For a band whose work explores every fringe of jazz fusion, employing a whole range of funky novelties and serious experimentation, on the night of their album launch show, I couldn’t help but feel that Echo Hotel Collective played it safe. As with their debut album the exceptional Square-Eyed, the band don’t give themselves enough credit for their original material and instead relied on crowd-pleasing material based around video soundtracks. With tunes interpolating favourites amongst the gamer/jazz intersection like GTA 5, The Witcher III, and The Legend of Zelda to a specific niche, I can imagine the appeal. Who could resist the appeal of a band imbued with playful finesse performing the soundtrack of a misspent youth? To those of us without such nostalgia however, it felt like a novelty best reserved for a portion of the evening rather than the bulk of it.

As with Square-Eyed, the most compelling moments were their original tunes. Beginning with a wall-of-jazz refrain from the opening song on the album, Niko’s Jam, the band captivated the audience from the outset. Echo Hotel Collective are heavily inspired by Snarky Puppy, whom they shouted out with a cover of their song Skate U. But this inspiration comes through in the best way. Rather than ripping off anything from the actual sound, they instead adopt the composition approach of Snarky Puppy: ‘a pop band who improvise a lot, and without vocals’ as Snarky Puppy are often characterised. This explains why their originals are so catchy, their compositions undeniably inspired by the greats of jazz-funk like The Blackbyrds, with a pop sensibility. This explains why the main riff of Niko’s Funk remains firmly stuck in my head days after hearing it being performed—I feel as if I know Niko personally at this point, given my familiarity with his funk.

The momentum climaxed with the third song; an earlier cut left off their debut album—a fact that must be one of the great musical injustices of 2024. Fuzzy and experimental, hard-hitting and fast-paced, this performance stands out as a highlight of an evening of high-quality entertainment. Armed with two drumkits capable of dispensing intercontinental beats and polyrhythms, the sheer power of this song made the video game standards that came after feel trite in comparison. Tracks like these show the band is able to take themselves seriously at some points, but with the humour to take risks and enjoy the process. To treat their songs as serious without losing themselves in the artful seriousness of it all. And I can only hope they will include this one on a later release. 

After the first few tracks, however, the band fell into the groove (which is what they do best, to be sure) of soundtrack renditions and reimagining. After an hour of this, even my League of Legends enthusiast partner-in-concertgoing was tired of the geeking out. The charm of the band’s performance and the endearing, down-to-earth humour of bandleader Johnny Richardson won the band seemingly endless goodwill—even after the band stopped playing their mesmerising originals and fell into the safety blanket of the soundtrack mire. By the final couple of bops, almost half the audience was drawn to the front of stage as the band gave them no choice but to dance to their infectious groove, which is no small feat in a slightly austere venue like Summerhall, where gigs can sometimes feel like a school assembly. Naturally, a band with the sense of fun and charisma like Echo Hotel Collective could never be afflicted by this. Even when my ADHD ravaged mind led my eyes to linger more on the videogame playthroughs projected behind the band more than their fifth or sixth soundtrack selection, that sweet Echo Hotel rhythm never left me. If the band incorporated their nerd-jazz tendencies more into their originals rather than demonstrating it with a preponderance of soundtracks, they could be unstoppable as their rock-solid compositions.