Last week I had the pleasure of attending another Roots Jam Session.

As you should know, The Roots are the house band for Jimmy Fallon’s late night show. They’re definitely turning the idea of a house band on its head and ?uestlove is turning out to be quite a musical director! Can’t wait until they offer him major award show gigs.

Since they’ve been in NYC for extended periods of time, they’ve decided to bless their fans yet again (you have NO idea!) with a series of Jam Sessions at Highline Ballroom. They’ve been occuring weekly (with some breaks) and they have continually sold out. You get to see one of the best bands perform with awesome musical guests such as Living Colour, Angelo Moore (Fishbone), Craig G, Jeru the Damaja , Imani Uzuri, and many others. All of this for only $10. Its definitely not a typical performance: don’t expect to hear your favorite song off “Things Fall Apart”. You might hear a song or two but it is exactly what it claims to be: a jam session. I went to one back in spring and had a great time. I definitely wanted to make another one but hadn’t yet gotten around to it until now.

I won a contest through Brooklyn Bowl, who was hosting a special Jam Session on October 1st. Its a great venue-bowling alley/concert hall/bar/restaurant with food by Blue Ribbon. The bowling alley is definitely not for a couple to have a little bowling date since prime-time rates are $50 an hour for a lane but if you get a decent number of folks together, its definitely more affordable. However, since it was just my brother and I, we settled for $6 dollar local beers at the bar by the stage and a pizza by the L train on the way home instead of the award winning cuisine served up at the venue.

I have to say the highlight of the show for me was at the very beginning, when two gentlemen came out and sat down-one at a drum kit, the other in front of a Korg-and began to play music that I can only describe (perhaps not accurately) as Portishead meets Bjork meets Beirut. These two gentlemen are known as Pattern Is Movement and have now unseated fashion designers Costello Tagliapietra as my new favorite bears.

They have a few songs on their myspace here. One of the songs they performed was “Sound of Your Voice” which was my favorite. They also brought in the entire Jam Session band (?uest included) and did two covers that make me think that they secretly wish they were an R&B act: Beyonce’s “Crazy in Love” and D’Angelo’s “Untitled”. They totally managed to make it their own and even a bit strange with the unusual warblings of singer/keyboardist Andrew Thiboldeaux on “Untitled”. I enjoyed every minute and the Chris Ward is absolutely nasty on the drums.

After that it was a cavalcade of familiar affiliates of The Roots (Ursula Rucker, Talib Kweli) and a hip hop meets reggae meets afrobeat group called Bajah and the Dry-Eye Crew, who hail from Sierra Leone. After all that typing about these jam sessions specifically *not* being concerts, this one was pretty structured with even The Roots themselves doing some familiar songs. They closed out the session with a great rendition of “I Can Understand It”  based off the New Birth’s version of the Bobby Womack song, which in my opinion, is the best.

Here’s footage of Pattern Is Movement doing “Untitled”