A Blast From The Future?

When young musicians re-animate a couple of classics

A few days ago, I was half-watching one of my favorite music streamers while plowing through the household bills, . This particular youtuber reliably introduces me to bands and artists I end up loving. He teed up a live performance that quickly caused me to forget what I was working on. It had a weird mix of old familiarity, and the frisson of something new. I was enthralled — the bills were going to have to wait.

The familiarity was in part because the two pieces they played had been anchors of my college soundtrack. They are among the best compositions by two of my favorite musicians.

To my surprise, it turned out that I was also quite familiar with some of the members of the band putting on this performance. I hadn’t realized that any of them had played together before. This was in fact part of their first tour together.

They are a young group. Two of them are teenagers, but they play like veterans, with soul and an intuitive sense of what the song calls for. The performance I was watching was recorded in late 2024, and it sounds both modern and old-school at the same time.

Listening to this transported me back to the time when I first heard the original recordings. I had arrived at college for my freshman year, armed with a secret weapon: my prized record collection. On move-in day, as all the arriving students lugged their worldly possessions up the front steps and into the dorm, I was most solicitous of that crate full of vinyl.

The best bit of news was that one of my roommates had brought a small stereo system. We all eventually pitched in for a bigger sound system, but for the first couple of months we got by with the tinny little speakers. All that mattered was that we had music.

I was proud of my modest collection of oddities — or so I thought them, because they certainly were not what most of my high-school classmates listened to. After I had settled in with my new roommates, I quickly got a shock. Two of them were musicians, and their musical universes made mine feel like a tiny backwater. They looked at my albums with a shrug. Been there, done that.

During the ensuing weeks, in the evenings after we had eaten dinner and done some homework, we would crank up the stereo, and I would find myself immersed in worlds I had never imagined. Miles Davis, Sarah Vaughan, Keith Jarrett, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, Herbie Hancock and Weather Report. Patti Smith, Black Sabbath, Yes, the Velvet Underground, the Sex Pistols, and the Finnish abstract composer Charles Wuorinen, to name a few.

My roommates and their friends were handy with illicit chemicals, but honestly, I didn’t need help to get high on the music. This vortex of sounds and harmonies expanded my brain far more than any psychedelic substances ever could have. My prized record collection got relatively little play (with the exception of my out-of-print copy of “Thelonius Alone”.) I was too busy soaking up all the new music.

In the midst of all this sensory overload, certain records really stood out. I still hear them in my head today, despite not having played some of them in decades. They changed the way I heard everything, and they still do.

This article is, in part, about two of those records, but it is also about the way a group of dazzling young musicians have given a new life to those compositions. So it’s both a “blast from the past” and a blast from the future.

Billy Cobham: “Stratus” (from the album “Spectrum”)

The first time I heard this album, I got goosebumps. There was just something different about it. It was a jazz album, but behind all the finesse, you got the feeling that there was some sort of monster in a cage, just waiting to get out. It started with Cobham’s drumming, which was tight, precise, and full of barely suppressed violence.

The roster of musicians on the album included some of the most important jazz and fusion musicians of the era, but the wild card was an unknown young guitarist named Tommy Bolin. I would later stumble across him again when he popped up as Ritchie Blackmore’s replacement in the proto-metal band Deep Purple.

Bolin died at the age of 25, leaving behind a mountain of work with many of the top jazz, soul, rock and funk artists of the era, as well as two solo albums which display a wildly varied range of styles and talents. His playing on “Spectrum” is nothing short of spectacular, and “Stratus” is my favorite piece from the album.

Jeff Beck: “The Pump”, from “There and Back”

What was on your college soundtrack? For many of us, it was Disco, Springsteen, and “soft rock” like Jackson Browne and the Eagles. But that was what we heard blasting at parties. When I listened just for myself, it was the likes of Jeff Beck, Herbie Hancock, Heart, Black Sabbath, and Blondie.

Beck’s breakout records “Blow by Blow” and “Wired” were successful crossover albums — they made the popular album charts and appealed both to musicians and to fans of all sorts of music. They were not the only fusion albums out there — far from it; but they were probably the most popular with a wider audience.

This is from Jeff Beck’s 1980 album “There and Back”. In this case, I picked the original studio track. Beck could play pyrotechnically when he wanted to, but here he creates a masterpiece of mood and tone. No one else could get the emotions out of a guitar the way he did.

And so I found myself a few weeks ago, drawn into reminiscing about my college years, even as I marveled at the artistry and skill of these young musicians who were able to put their own color on such timeless music. Where to start?

The big draw here is Lisa-X, the wunderkind guitarist who founded her own band at the age of 13 and has collaborated with many of the top musicians in the world. She gets a lot of attention for her outrageous shredding, but in this set, she leaves the shredding to the other guitarists and instead turns in some gorgeous, subtle, jazzy improvisations.

The bandleader is Jack Thammarat, known to many as “Thailand’s Greatest Guitarist”. Jack won the 2009 Guitar Idol competition, and with a little luck could have been the Lisa-X of his day. He has a warm, emotional tone to his playing, often summoning a sound similar to that of his idol, Eric Johnson. At moments, he makes the notes sound like a summer rainstorm.

The third guitarist is Alex Hutchings, a Brit who is in demand as a session player and co-leads the touring Michael Jackson tribute review “Thriller Live”. I love his light touch and whimsical choices of chords. He also knows when to add a little shredding to spice things up.

The young drummer is Rasta Thira Aotphiban, who just turned 12. He plays with uncanny maturity and has a great sense of his fellow musicians. From what I have seen, he leans toward jazz, with its emphasis on improvisation. Not sure what more there is to say about him, except that he has a great future.

This clip is basically a classic jam session. The group frame each of the songs in its original melody, and in between they take turns improvising. The three guitarists have such different styles that it’s almost disconcerting how well they complement each other. For a guitar nerd, this is as good as it gets.

In a world of short songs built for streaming, it is comforting to see musicians this young who have the patience needed to play music like this. I hope you’ll play the whole clip and leave them some love.

What do you think? Have you recently heard new versions of old favorites? Not just covers, but re-imaginings? Leave them in the comments!