Ben Folds Five's first tour since 2013 stops at Pompano Beach Amphitheater

Ben Folds, Robert Sledge and Darren Jessee are touring together again, and their short April run includes Pompano Beach on Friday, April 16.

A piano, a fuzzed-out bass and a drummer who sings harmony: that's the whole band, and it's back. Ben Folds Five have announced their first tour since 2013, and one of the few stops is the Pompano Beach Amphitheater on Friday, April 16, 2027. Doors open at 7 p.m., the show starts at 8, and tickets are on sale through AXS.

The trio, Ben Folds, Robert Sledge and Darren Jessee, announced the run on Oct. 21 (Stereogum), and the first wave of tickets went on sale Friday, Oct. 23 (Spin). It's a short tour: roughly nine dates through the Southeast and Texas in April (SeatGeek). It opens at Knoxville's Tennessee Theatre on April 12 and Chattanooga's Tivoli Theatre on April 13, then comes down to Jacksonville on April 15 and Pompano Beach the next night. After that it heads west to ACL Live in Austin on April 20 (CultureMap) and wraps up in Birmingham on April 24.

Pompano Beach is the only South Florida date on a tour of about nine shows.

That's the stake for Broward. The tour comes to this part of the state once, on a Friday, at a 2,600-capacity outdoor amphitheater, and then it's gone. Anyone who has waited since 2013 to hear these three play together has one shot within driving distance.

The timing follows the band's catalog work. In September, the trio put out an expanded reissue of Ben Folds Five, their self-titled 1995 debut, and the tour lands a few months after it (Stereogum). SeatGeek notes that no new studio album has been announced to go with the dates, so expect a night built on the songs people already know by heart.

The band's sound was always a bit of a trick: a rock trio with no guitar, built around a piano played hard enough to sound like one, Sledge's distorted bass, and Jessee's drums and harmonies holding it all together. The trio is a different animal from Folds's solo work, and the reissue reminded a lot of fans of that.

The amphitheater is a good fit for it. An April evening outdoors in Pompano Beach, with doors at seven, gives you time to find a spot and settle in before the band comes on. It's a room big enough for a reunion crowd but not so big that a piano trio gets lost in it.

The details: Ben Folds Five, Pompano Beach Amphitheater, Friday, April 16, 2027, doors 7 p.m., show 8 p.m., tickets via AXS. Five months gives you plenty of time to find someone who knows all the words, and you'll want them with you.

Sources: AXS — Ben Folds Five at Pompano Beach Amphitheater (axs.com); JamBase — Ben Folds Five at Pompano Beach Amphitheater (jambase.com); Stereogum — Ben Folds Five announce reunion tour (stereogum.com); Spin — Ben Folds Five first tour since 2013 (spinmagazine.com); SeatGeek — Ben Folds Five announce first tour since 2013 (seatgeek.com); CultureMap Austin — Ben Folds Five at ACL Live (austin.culturemap.com); JamBase — Ben Folds Five reunites for 2027 U.S. tour (jambase.com); Ben Folds Five - Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org)