by Tehillah de Castro
DOMi & JD Beck embody the chemical cocktail of creativity that is produced when two musical prodigies come together to make a sound; it’s an undiscovered element on the periodic table. The product is a spacey, jazzy drum and keyboard combination that could be described as Medeski, Martin & Wood meets Battles, but that may be an oversimplification.
Domi Louna is a French musician who started her dalliance with keyboardistry at age 3 and enrolled at the Conservatoire de Nancy at age 5 to study classical and jazz. She then moved on to the Conservatoire de Paris and Berklee College of Music in Boston. It was at Berklee that she garnered the attention of musical notables such as Anderson .Paak, Thundercat and Louis Cole, all of whom recruited her for their projects.
JD Beck, growing up near Dallas, charted his own precocious path on piano at age 5 and a move to drums at age 9. By age 10, he was gigging and being mentored by Cleon Edwards a.k.a Gud Foot, who plays drums with Erykah Badu.
Louna and Beck met as teen-agers at the 2018 NAMM conference and the stir they created as very online duo took time to yield a proper debut album: 2022’s NOT TiGHT on .Paak’s Apeshit Inc. label. The reviews skewed positive in Pitchfork and elsewhere, and Grammy nominations soon followed for a record exuding a youthful charm full of complex time-signatures and break beats.
Skip ahead to 2026 and their newest release, Who Asked?, on the storied Blue Note jazz label, is giving reviewers whiplash with its whirlwind of orchestral sounds and easy-listening harmonies, everything supercharged with a mischievous, chaotic spirit.
And, really, what were the critics expecting? This dynamic duo dares you to pigeonhole them, only to demolish the formula and make a new thing with the pieces. Like musical kintsugi, an aural fixation with exploring the beauty in the broken, DOMi & JD Beck are finding their way through indietronica and flower-power freedom with shifty time signatures and chamber-pop melodies.
Domi & JD Beck play 7:30pm Friday, September 18 at Culture Room in Fort Lauderdale. domiandjdbeck.com ~ Tim Moffatt
