Just one year ago tonight, Thundercat brought his low-slung six-string bass and falsetto to Kodak Hall for the Rochester International Jazz Festival’s Headliner Series — Stephen Bruner, the genre-melting Grammy winner who held down the bottom end on Kendrick Lamar’s ‘To Pimp a Butterfly’ and made jazz cool for a generation that grew up on Flying Lotus and Brainfeeder. Eastman Theatre’s gold-and-cream concert hall, built for symphonies in 1922, became a portal — funk, fusion, electronic textures, and Bruner’s still-impossible bass runs filling the room.
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