Last Friday, 11/26/10, Inspired Flight got to open for the amazing Ninja Tune artist, Bonobo! Not only do we feel blessed to have been given such a great opportunity and experience, but the night went even better than I had hoped in so many ways. One of the coolest parts of the night for me is that this is only iF’s second proper LA show, and it was at the Music Box at the Fonda. Since I began playing music in my old rock band, jack the original, LA has been this magical, competitive, and important market that I had no idea quite how to tap into, yet knew had to be played to ultimately succeed. Even as Inspired Flight has been a project for over three years now, with many shows under our belt, we haven’t even played LA until just this September when we played The Roxy. Playing The Roxy, by the way, was a huge accomplishment for me, and a huge relief! I’ve always feared that cracking into the LA market would require countless shows at random bars/venues with pay-to-play pressure on us, and dance floors looking like an old western ghost town. But our first LA show was opening for White Panda, a national-touring act, at The Roxy, and our second has been opening for Bonobo at the Music Box! How this is happening I don’t quite know, but it feels really good and I am THANKFUL!
     Another thing that made our show so special was that even though we opened the whole night at 9pm sharp, the venue was very full of people eagerly awaiting to hear us play, and all pushed up towards the stage. My guess would be that 600-1000 people were there when we played, and even if the true number is somewhere much closer to my lower guess, it’s still the biggest, and probably most attentive, audience iF has played too yet. And they showed us love! Having Scarub from Living Legends and Afro Classics come out to be a special guest on two of our songs surely helped, but from beginning to end we got a very welcoming and positive response from the crowd. I could get used to this… It was also a real joy to have our friend, Scarub, come out to support and perform with us on the show. He had a great time that night as well, and hopefully this is the start to many shows with him as a featured guest MC.
     Coolest part of the night? Hmmmmmm, that’s a tough one. What could it possibly be? I wonder….. Oh yeah… we billed with Bonobo! Nothing against Tokimonsta, who was also on the bill, and does great dub-step/low-end-theory type stuff, but Bonobo is somebody that we in Inspired Flight are really big fans of, and have been for awhile. Bonobo is even one of OpenOptics’ biggest influences for making beats and production. And the NInja Tune label he is signed to is one of our favorite record labels that we have aspirations to do business and network with. What made this so awesome though is that Bonobo and everyone in his band are super cool, down-to-earth, nice, jovial people. This is why billing with him was so fantastic! Getting to hang out and chat with all of them from the time we got there to load-in, till the time we loaded out and went home, was great, and is what really made the whole experience so wonderful. Hopefully this will lead to an Inspired Flight-Bonobo collab or remix in the future! Lets all keep our fingers crossed for that one.
     To anybody who came out to the show to see us, thank you so much! And to all of the people there that night who discovered iF for the first time, thank you for being a great audience member and for not throwing tomatoes and beer bottles at us. Thank you so much to everyone who supported us after we played by buying our CD, vinyl, or other merch. We hope to see you soon in LA again, hopefully opening for somebody else cool, and avoiding the pay-to-play ghost towns dreaded by so many indie bands, and for which LA is so notoriously known.

-Chavez