North Beach Music Festival Wraps: Pigeons Playing Ping Pong, Spafford, TAUK and More Perform

Photo courtesy of North Beach Music Festival

North Beach Music Festival wrapped on Saturday evening after two days of jam-packed performances featuring top-tier improvisational rock headliners Pigeons Playing Ping Pong, Spafford and more.

The inaugural event took place on Dec. 10 and 11 in Miami Beach, Fla., with festival openers and Sunshine State natives, The Heavy Pets taking the Bandshell Stage.

Electro-prog quartet TAUK followed, playing tunes off their 2021 LP Chaos Companion, as well as fan favorites “Moon Dub” and “Dormammu,” the latter of which featured The Horn Section.

Friday’s breakout performance came from Karina Rykman, who played a high-energy set with her band that included “Plants,” “Arbitrary,” and “City Kids,” as well as covers of The Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” and LCD Soundsystem’s “Daft Punk Is Playing At My House.” 

Pigeons Playing Ping Pong closed out night one with a set of beach-themed fan favorites, including “Poseidon” and “Water.” The band then brought out numerous special guests; Jason Hann joined during “Move Like That” and “Upfunk,” TAUK’s Alric Carter played keys during “Sunny Day,” and The Horn Section sat in for the sets closing sequence of “King Kong,” segueing into Stevie Wonders’ “Signed, Sealed, Delivered,” before returning to “King Kong.”

Saturday featured Holly Bowling covering Grateful Dead favorites, “China Cat Sunflower” and “I Know You Rider,” as well as Phish classics “Divided Sky” and “It’s Ice.”  

Headliners, Spafford then performed the first of two sets, which saw them deliver 45-minutes of impressions and fully-improvised music that the band dubbed the “Miami Beach Jam.”

The evening closed out with the first-ever Spafford & Friend set, with special guests Altric Carter, Eric Krasno, Brandon “Taz” Niederauer and Marco Benevento 

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