36 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY september 21-27, 2023 www.montereycountyweekly.com MUSIC If you’ve heard Thundercat’s music, you’ll know he’s not your typical Monterey Jazz Festival headliner. Yet his inclusion at the top of this year’s bill speaks to the festival’s ever-expanding tent—one more open than ever to a diversity of sounds, styles and volumes. Stephen Bruner may not be a jazz artist per se, but his musical stylings as Thundercat most certainly owe a debt to the jazz he fell in love with and began playing as a kid in Los Angeles. Like his longtime friend, collaborator and fellow L.A. native Kamasi Washington, Bruner has taken jazz’s bedrocks of freedom and experimentation, fused them with a wide assortment of influences—funk, R&B, hip-hop, electronic and psychedelia— and sought to create something wholly different and forward-thinking. That’s the music that will close this year’s 66th Monterey Jazz Festival when Thundercat takes the Jimmy Lyons Stage on Sunday evening for a set that should bring the house down— and which will encapsulate his triumphant ascent from virtuoso session bassist to Grammy-winning contemporary vanguard. After starting out as a teenager playing in various L.A. bands (including crossover thrash icons Suicidal Tendencies), Thundercat began making a name for himself as one of the most talented session bassists working around the turn of the 2010s—playing on Erykah Badu’s New Amerykah duology and striking up a partnership with Flying Lotus. Yet it was his integral contributions to rapper Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 modern classic, To Pimp a Butterfly, that really established him as an artist to be reckoned with. Thundercat’s work as bassist, vocalist and producer on the album shaped its jazz- and funk-imbued sonics, laying the perfect template for Lamar’s transcendent meditations on the Black American experience. It also set the table for his breakthrough solo album, 2017’s Drunk, which featured the infectious single “Them Changes” and other groovy reflections on drinking, loneliness and heartbreak. That was followed by 2020’s Grammy-winning album It Is What It Is. In April, Thundercat re-emerged with the single “No More Lies”—a rollicking collaboration with Tame Impala that staked a claim as 2023’s song of the summer. Thundercat performs 8:15pm Sunday, Sept. 24 on the Monterey Jazz Festival’s Jimmy Lyons Stage. SO MITSUYA Cool Cat Thundercat’s jazz-indebted stylings headline this year’s Monterey Jazz Festival. By Rey Mashayekhi A Jazz Festival appearance kicks off a string of tour dates for Stephen Bruner, aka Thundercat—so named for the cartoon he’s loved since childhood. MJF 66 PRESENTED BY
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