I took my dad to the last Thundercat show I saw. It was an honest mistake.
Listen to Thundercat’s debut album The Golden Age of Apocalypse and you might form a picture of a man who plays brainy music for seated halls full of aficionados. But Thundercat is also right-hand man to Flying Lotus and Kendrick Lamar, icons to a younger generation and, in many cases, their gateway into jazz. So my dad had to suffer the indignity of having smoke blown in his face by guys a third his age. It was a party—something jazz shows haven’t tended to be for a long time now that rock, hip hop and EDM shows have supplanted their social-music niche.
