Domi & JD Beck are singular.
A jazz duo consisting of keys and drums, DOMi and JD Beck fill a space musically that does not quite exist outside of them as an artistic unit. As more and more bands search for gimmicks that demand their audience dive a little bit deeper into the music to find sustenance. DOMi and JD require no costumes or theatrics to speak to their audience within a culture that often lacks an interest in complicated compositional weirdness. They’re hard to pigeonhole, and thank your deity of choice for that.
French born keyboardist DOMi received a full ride scholarship to the Berkley School of music when she was just a teenager, a couple of years into her education she met fellow child prodigy drummer JD Beck at the 2018 NAAM show. They began working with one another and played as backing bands for both Anderson. Paak and Thundercat the year after that chance encounter. During the pandemic, they released a number of viral videos to their social media accounts featuring them performing incredibly complicated pieces of music. When a MF Doom tribute medley dropped not long after his passing, they disappeared for close to a year… suddenly and seemingly without warning. In 2022, they released their first full-length album, “Not Tight,” and toured worldwide exhaustively to support it. A few months ago, they released their sophomore album, Who Asked?, and its companion instrumental version, You Asked.
They seem to be tighter than ever and touring exhaustively again. Lucky us.
When I arrived at Nuemos, I could hear a soundcheck in progress emanating from inside the small club. The young musicians seemed to be playing snippets of songs that I couldn’t place, but some of which seemed all too familiar. I tried to get a read on what they were playing at the time but couldn’t. The majority of the people I interacted with were middle-aged jazz fusion aficionados. I exchanged some pleasantries about Miles Davis alumnus John McLaughlin with a group of friends in attendance at the lip of the stage where I was hanging out, and they all bragged about what shows they had been seeing and the new young musicians they were discovering. One younger man in attendance asked me what I thought DOMi & JD Beck sounded like, to which I responded: “They’re like Weather Report on study drugs.” What happened next could not have been more perfect. The lights went down, and DOMi and JD took the stage, DOMi removing her slippers before getting behind her keyboard rig, with JD counting off and them launching into “Fast City” by Weather Report. A song I didn’t know they’d been playing, but they’ve been playing it a lot. Chalk it up to intuition?
After “Fast City” concluded, JD thanked us all for coming out, saying that it didn’t matter why we were there with them, but that they were glad we could all make it. Then he explained they were going to play an hour-long symphonic composition they wrote. There is nothing like getting to see active artists take chances, and this was everything I have ever wanted at shows. Playing along to prerecorded symphonic parts, this duo became far bigger in sound than you could anticipate. About 5 mins in, I realized the pieces I was hearing them practice before doors opened were from this symphonic suite that makes up the majority of the new album, but these were the instrumental versions I hadn’t heard. They were so far removed from the overall piece that I couldn’t place them.
After the orchestral suite, JD thanked those of us in attendance again and addressed that many people know them from little video clips and not their larger body of work. He mused about the fact that they didn’t think anyone was even going to come see them on this tour, and then they launched into the aforementioned “Madvillany Medley” MF Doom tribute that is currently sitting at 3.6 million views on YouTube. This version was a bit meatier as the improvisational passages stretched out a bit more. You could tell they have been living with it for quite some time, and as a result, it has taken on a little bit more of a mind of its own.
Throughout the evening, the music they created together was playful yet intense. JD’s breakbeats often accompanied DOMi’s passages that feel like John Zawinul and George Duke got in a blender with French Impressionist composers, creating vague implications of Debussy and Ravel by way of Zappa’s 1970s keyboardists. Her solos cascaded and twisted, overwhelming the senses as JD jumped with her through complicated time signatures that at times changed one bar after another. After their orchestral piece ended, they went on for another entire hour, dipping into older material and covers. Domi played a long solo at one point that I’m 99% certain was the Pat Metheny song “The Epic,” only here it was stripped down into a solo synth-heavy passage, which left the audience holding its breath, quietly and respectfully hanging on each and every note. JD sat quietly watching his bandmate while he smiled ear to ear as she took no prisoners.
Both of these musicians are truly awe-inspiring, and I was left slack-jawed with my mouth agape by several moments during the show. When trying to get a pulse on how people were enjoying it, I saw audience members looking at one another with dumbfounded expressions on their faces as if to ask, “Can you fucking believe this?” When they closed with the familiar riffs of “SNiFF,” I personally could hardly have asked for more. This was my second time seeing DOMi and JD, and last time the show was just over an hour. This time it was close to two. They’re growing and evolving, and if we’re all lucky, they’ll be doing so for many, many years to come. I look forward to a lot more from these brilliant musical geniuses.
