I don't know what you did to start your weekend, but I went to see Emefe, the 10 to 12-person Afro-Beat collective surrounding Miles Amtzen.
I spent all morning writing it up, so if you want more, you'll just have to see what I said at Blurt.
Namely...
Emefe + Mammal Dap 8/31/13, Northampton MA
Dates: August 31, 2013
Location: Iron Horse, Northampton MA
Emefe
BY JENNIFER KELLY
You don’t even realize the show has started until it has. Sometime in the complicated set-up for Emefe – 10 players, two drum stations, stacked keyboards, two guitars, a bass, a four-man horn line — all the shaker gourds have disappeared. Now towards the stairs that lead down to the bathroom, a syncopated beat has started to pound, a snaky conga line has formed, the bell-ends of trumpet, trombone and two saxophones are swinging side-to-side as the non-plugged in members of Emefe swagger in to “Stutter,” the opening track from their self-released album, Good Future. People in the audience are already sucked in to a swaying, blatting, stop-start Afro-beat groove before they have time to think about it. You can’t imagine how a sound this large – forget that, a band this large – will fit on the tiny Iron Horse stage. In fact, they’re taking up most of the dance floor, stomping and shaking in a circle, horns facing inward, a bleating, fluttering, agitated sound rising out of the center.
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Showing posts with label Antibalas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Antibalas. Show all posts
Sunday, September 1, 2013
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Antibalas
Still getting virus warnings at Blurt, so I'm just pasting the whole Antibalas review here:
Antibalas
Antibalas
(Daptone)
The multi-instrumented, multi-ethnic, Brooklynite disciples of Fela Kuti have been off for half a decade, some of them backing Sharon Jones, others composing and performing the score for Broadway's Fela!, still others participating in funk-world-soul collaborations with, among others, Ocote Sound System. During the time off, Afro-beat has become, if anything, less of an exotic hybrid, more an accepted part of the landscape. These polyrhythmic, in-the-pocket grooves are not quite as American as tacos or pizza at this point, but they are also no longer quite so foreign. You don't have to trade Nigeria 70 on battered cassette tapes anymore. You can order it on Amazon.
So let's set aside, at least for the moment, the worthy role that Antibalas played in popularizing some of the world's funkiest, most searing grooves, the way the band has relentlessly, show-by-show, town-by-town, built up awareness and appreciation of Nigerian funk. How good is Antibalas the album, the band's fourth, on its own merits? The answer is: pretty good, but not as great as its inspiration.
"Dirty Money" starts in a fractured friction of multilayered drums, an organ line (that's longtime Antibalian Victor Axelrod on keys) strutting and slinking amid flash-lightning illuminations of brass and saxophone. The song balances on a knife edge between laid-back ease and propulsive motion. It leads with the hips, all physical insistence, yet remains rather cool and contemplative at its core. "The Ratcatcher," up next, also melds traditional drum kit with the syncopated tonalities of cowbell, claves, bongos and horn bursts (the horns are just as percussive as the drums). Seventies American soul twitches to life in the Shaft-era guitar work of Marcos Garcia, the space-age funk of the keyboards, but there's fusion jazz, too, in the wild keening and blaring of Stuart Bogie's saxophone. "Sare Kon Kon" (or "We Are Running") is, perhaps the most furiously heated of these tracks, skittering forward on a staccato rhythm of hand drums and overlayed with vocal howls, moans and exclamations.
Like Fela himself, Antibalas engages whole-heartedly in politics, making the common man's struggles a center of its syncopated, body-moving art. The video for "Dirty Money" is explicitly tied to the Occupy Movement, making abstract lyrics about a man drowning and falling off buildings concrete and economically determined. (Though doing so, in a fairly lighthearted way, and with Muppets.) "Sáré Kon Kon" is less of a narrative, more a direct channeling of post-global meltdown anxieties. Its motion is ceaseless and, oddly, circular, as rhythms hurry this way and that, as saxophones blare, as people shout and groan...without anyone getting much of anywhere. Afro-beat has always been protest music, but it's also an escape hatch, a physically enveloping, mildly hallucinatory experience that puts harsh realities on hold.
I still sense a bit of remove, of holding back, of loving tribute rather than full-body engagement in Antibalas' work. Heard next to actual Fela, it sounds ever so slightly scholarly and dry. Yet there's so much positive in this band's work - in its devotion to an intricate aesthetic, its commitment to justice, its sensual, hip-shifting appeal - that it hardly seems fair to grade it against the source.
DOWNLOAD: "Dirty Money" "The Ratcatcher" "Sáré Kon Kon" JENNIFER KELLY
Here's that Muppet video
Antibalas
Antibalas
(Daptone)
The multi-instrumented, multi-ethnic, Brooklynite disciples of Fela Kuti have been off for half a decade, some of them backing Sharon Jones, others composing and performing the score for Broadway's Fela!, still others participating in funk-world-soul collaborations with, among others, Ocote Sound System. During the time off, Afro-beat has become, if anything, less of an exotic hybrid, more an accepted part of the landscape. These polyrhythmic, in-the-pocket grooves are not quite as American as tacos or pizza at this point, but they are also no longer quite so foreign. You don't have to trade Nigeria 70 on battered cassette tapes anymore. You can order it on Amazon.
So let's set aside, at least for the moment, the worthy role that Antibalas played in popularizing some of the world's funkiest, most searing grooves, the way the band has relentlessly, show-by-show, town-by-town, built up awareness and appreciation of Nigerian funk. How good is Antibalas the album, the band's fourth, on its own merits? The answer is: pretty good, but not as great as its inspiration.
"Dirty Money" starts in a fractured friction of multilayered drums, an organ line (that's longtime Antibalian Victor Axelrod on keys) strutting and slinking amid flash-lightning illuminations of brass and saxophone. The song balances on a knife edge between laid-back ease and propulsive motion. It leads with the hips, all physical insistence, yet remains rather cool and contemplative at its core. "The Ratcatcher," up next, also melds traditional drum kit with the syncopated tonalities of cowbell, claves, bongos and horn bursts (the horns are just as percussive as the drums). Seventies American soul twitches to life in the Shaft-era guitar work of Marcos Garcia, the space-age funk of the keyboards, but there's fusion jazz, too, in the wild keening and blaring of Stuart Bogie's saxophone. "Sare Kon Kon" (or "We Are Running") is, perhaps the most furiously heated of these tracks, skittering forward on a staccato rhythm of hand drums and overlayed with vocal howls, moans and exclamations.
Like Fela himself, Antibalas engages whole-heartedly in politics, making the common man's struggles a center of its syncopated, body-moving art. The video for "Dirty Money" is explicitly tied to the Occupy Movement, making abstract lyrics about a man drowning and falling off buildings concrete and economically determined. (Though doing so, in a fairly lighthearted way, and with Muppets.) "Sáré Kon Kon" is less of a narrative, more a direct channeling of post-global meltdown anxieties. Its motion is ceaseless and, oddly, circular, as rhythms hurry this way and that, as saxophones blare, as people shout and groan...without anyone getting much of anywhere. Afro-beat has always been protest music, but it's also an escape hatch, a physically enveloping, mildly hallucinatory experience that puts harsh realities on hold.
I still sense a bit of remove, of holding back, of loving tribute rather than full-body engagement in Antibalas' work. Heard next to actual Fela, it sounds ever so slightly scholarly and dry. Yet there's so much positive in this band's work - in its devotion to an intricate aesthetic, its commitment to justice, its sensual, hip-shifting appeal - that it hardly seems fair to grade it against the source.
DOWNLOAD: "Dirty Money" "The Ratcatcher" "Sáré Kon Kon" JENNIFER KELLY
Here's that Muppet video
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