I left Richard Bona’s concert at the Melkweg last night feeling an unpleasant mix of awe and irritation. Funnily enough, both reactions can be traced back to one thing: his professionalism.

First, the positive: my great golly goodness gracious the man can play and can sing. When he really let rip on the bass I couldn’t take my eyes off his fingers, but I couldn’t follow ’em either. Most of the backing band were equally spectacular, when they got a chance to take a solo (with the possible exception of the guitarist, but I’m a bit biased against the instrument in that context anyway). The percussionist, in particular, gave a more-than-five-minute conga solo after which he had to take a break for half a song to mop his face.

That’s where the negative impression starts coming in. Bona himself never gave the impression of getting outside his comfort zone or putting musical effort into the performance. I was looking for him on YouTube, so I could explain to my officemates what he was about, and I found this footage of part of a bass solo. It’s technically very impressive, and wicked cool to see live — I know, because he produced exactly the same solo, complete with audience laughter in the same places, last night. That’s actually more funny than irritating, but it points towards a genuine complaint: he’s genuinely dazzling when he lets himself go, but those moments were almost all so short that you had the feeling he was just tossing out scraps to remind you that he could do amazing things, and the rest of the time he’s just taking it easy.

The laughter is another sore point: he spent an awful lot of time entertaining rather than playing, jollying the audience along with jokery when he could have been sweeping them along with his sound. Even worse, on some occasions he subverted the music he was making by turning it into a joke. Now, I’m all for musical jokes — that semitone slip in the bass solo is a lovely lively move, and I laughed when he pulled it out. But he took it too far. I’m thinking particularly of an a capella number: a solo in four-part harmony, using a loop machine to build up the dense polyrhythmic accompaniment and skipping back to a second mike for the melody. It was a virtuoso performance and a truly beautiful piece of music, but every time he recorded a new loop there was a pantomime of surprise at the new sounds coming out, complete with grotesque face-pulling. And the audience laughed, of course… just imagine how unforgivable that would be if he hadn’t been playing the fool! Well, it spoiled my enjoyment of what was a truly lovely piece of music, and I’m just as irritated at Richard Bona as I would have been if some bonehead in the crowd had burst out laughing during the same song done straight.

I said at the beginning that both impressions had to do with professionalism. In the negative sense I’m thinking of a particular kind of professionalism: one that sees playing on stage, or more generally entertaining an audience, as a job to be done well but that requires no passion, and as not necessarily involving a real connection with the audience. That last point was made quite clear when we clapped and shouted and whistled for a second encore for some six or seven minutes without the noise level diminishing noticeably… and then the lights went up and the DJ started. To me that reflects the professionalism of a touring entertainer who knows very well how far he has to travel tomorrow, but none of the feedback loop that can energise a crowd and feed that energy in turn back into the musicians.

So I was highly impressed with his music, and I’ll be looking out for it on eMu, but I won’t be going back next time he plays. The scraps, tasty as they are, aren’t worth the feeling that you’re being … well, thrown scraps.