This past Saturday, Hip Hop group The Roots graced the stage at the Royal Festival Hall. Their performance signalled the beginning of the Ornette Coleman Meltdown Festival.

The set began with Questlove and Black Thought coming out on stage. With an audience mixed with ethnicity’s, Black Thought payed homage to classic Hip Hop groups. First up, Thought paid tribute to Run DMC. Soon the emcee went into his rendition of Wu Tang’s “Protect Your Neck” followed by Rakim’s “As The Rhyme Goes On”. Only pockets of the audience knew these tracks but that didn’t stop others from vibing to it. At times during the evening I saw a middle aged woman getting her dance on!

Soon the whole band were on stage and the hits were rolling out. Frankie Knuckles who was on percussion was the hype man for the band, often leaving his post to get the crowd clapping their hands or to make some noise. At one or two points, the sound levels were a little off but that’s not the band’s fault, that’s a technical problem.

Sensing this, after a few tracks, Thought told the crowd not to feel obliged to remain seated but to get up on their feet. Now the performance was in full swing.

I wasn’t too sure what kind of crowd to expect because it wasn’t necessarily a ”Hip Hop” crowd but the audience warmed to the band.

“You Got Me” was remixed into a reggae track, which was brilliant and it had me vibing but for me, there wasnt enough of this. I was really hoping for more renditions like this.

One of the great moments of the evening was when each member of the band had their solo. Questlove (on drums) wowed the crowd with his set. He then started a musical question and answer session with Frankie Knuckles on percussion. They had the crowd hanging on to everything they were doing. All of a sudden, Quest got out of his seat, still playing the drums, making his way over to Frankie. What was cool was when Quest couldn’t reach his drums, he’d hit anything to make a musical sound. Frankie returned the favour, going from his percussion instruments, to Quest’s drums.

The highlight of the evening however was seeing the legendary Andy Hamilton, David Murray and Ornette Coleman rock with the band. Hamilton who is 91, played the saxophone along with David Murray. I wasn’t expecting Coleman to be on stage and it was a pleasant surprise. For those that are not aware, Coleman was one of the innovators of the free jazz movement. The 79 year old played a fantastic solo.

Black Thought said “There’s 250 years of musical genius on this side of the stage over here”  and you could see it was an honour for the band to perform with these three artists that have broken ground in music.

The three legends got a standing ovation and that seemed to be the end of the night. The band left the stage. The end seemed like an anti-climax, it didn’t feel right. The crowd then started cheering urging the band to come back on stage. Questlove appeared on stage, he gauged how much the crowd wanted to hear more music, it felt it was enough so he walked off. A few booed but the rest of Royal Festival Hall, lifted the roof off and the band came back for a couple more songs.

Two hours and 15 minutes of live music from the legendary Roots crew. You cant ask for more.

The Meltdown Festival is currently underway and I’ll urge all music fans to head down to the Royal Festival Hall in London and check it out.

For more information log on to http://meltdown.southbankcentre.co.uk/