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“Late Night With Jimmy Fallon” pretty much owning late night music booking
The music booker on “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” is a 33-year old former Billboard reporter named Jonathan Cohen. Inside of a year, he has made that embattled late-night show broadcast TV’s most interesting venue for live music.
Nothing else comes close.
“In my earliest discussions with Jimmy, the thing that was most important to him was variety, almost like someone’s iPod,” Cohen said Tuesday. “That’s the principle on which I’m booking.”
To that end, Cohen occasionally books acts that have been out of the spotlight for a long period or legendary bands that have never played on TV before.
For example, when the ’90s rock band Jawbox wanted to promote the 2009 reissue of their 1994 album “For Your Own Special Sweetheart,” instead of disrupting their children’s lives with a tour, they played a reunion gig on “Fallon.”
This was huge news for 30-somethings who remembered the band from countless ’90s club shows. It was moving to see the band blaze and roar like Clinton was still in the White House.
“I had been a fan for a long time and had corresponded with (Jawbox) as a journalist,” Cohen said. “Lo and behold, they were interested in talking about (playing on the show). It turned into an open soundcheck for their friends and family where they played a number of songs. That was really a special thing.”
It helps the show that the hip-hop act the Roots serves as house band. The crew brings both impeccable chops and hip-hop’s world-view to the notoriously bland world of late-night TV bands. (Roots drummer Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson is also an infamous record nerd, which can’t hurt.)
“The Roots also provides a distinctive element that allows us to do some collaborations that you might not otherwise see,” Cohen says. “That’s very appealing to artists.”
On April 2, “Fallon” played host to Liquid Liquid, a New York band who blended post-punk’s spare instrumentation with disco and dub reggae rhythms and arrangements.
The band was active only from 1980 to 1983, though they began playing together again now and then in 2008. Their song “Cavern” became part of hip-hop’s grammar when Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five sampled the bassline for the anti-cociane anthem “White Lines.”
Now, there was no real reason to book Liquid Liquid. The band’s last album was an anthology of old material released in 2008.
“That started as a conversation with Questlove,” Cohen said. “I don’t think he knew the band was active and I had never seen them. I floated the idea to him about the Roots playing ‘Cavern’ with the band because I don’t think a lot of younger people knew where that sample came from.”
The results were hypnotic and joyous.
Check out the performance here.
“I don’t want to go too niche with all this stuff, but it’s trying to find that sweet spot between cool things and broader stuff,” Cohen says. “That’s all coming from Jimmy.”
A few interesting upcoming bookings on “Late Night:”
The Specials play April 13; it’s their first U.S. gig since 1980. That band is currently on tour.
April 16, the Flaming Lips play a song from “Dark Side of the Moon.”
And May 10 to 14, Cohen says the show will have a five-day tribute to the Rolling Stones’ classic “Exile on Main Street.” Four bands will play covers off that record Monday through Thursday. Friday, a new documentary on the album called “Stones in Exile” will premier.
Two bands have not been announced, but Keith Urban performs May 11 and Phish performs May 13, their first TV performance in six years.
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