Green Bay and Marquette, You Set?

Off to Jimmy Sea’s again in Green Bay for a Thursday performance this week.  Then Friday and Saturday is our triumphant return to Marquette Michigan at Upfront and Company.  After a brief boycott by the local Alphamale Stigma Pie fraternity, we’ve been re-welcomed by the local “cool people.”  Both nights are sure to pack very different experimental twists and turns.  Click on the “Performances” link above for details on  this weekend’s shows.  Don’t forget to request your favorite Americana Classic played by the onboard computer on our new tour bus including “Deep in the Heart of Texas”, “If I were a rich man”, “Wild Blue Yonder” and other American RV classics.

Chicago’s darkroom on Friday, Champaigns Canopy Club Saturday

This Friday night we cap off our two-week return to Chicago with a 10 p.m. performance at darkroom on Chicago Avenue, collaboarting for the first time at a event with Mwelma, who hosts an residency at darkroom on the second Friday of every month. In addition to our show, expect an eclectic mix of down tempo, future boogie, afrobeat, latin grooves, Brazilian beats, African variety and house with resident DJ 4BZ with guest DJ Select. On Saturday we’ll brush off any lingering snow from our bus (early snow showers here in Chicago this morning) and truck down to Champaign for a gig at The Canopy Club. Print out this page and bring it to the Champaign show for a $2 discount. We’ll see you there.

Esquire Magazine: “The Electrified Likembe”

This article originally appeared in Esquire magazine.

IN ALL POPULAR MUSIC, the road to suck is paved with good intentions. This is especially true of world music: The very name is anemic, roping in supposedly pure sounds as disparate as Celtic reels and Chinese pentatonic-scale caterwauling. All the more reason, then, to celebrate the stateside Afrobeat underground that’s been steadily building for a few years now. And the one single sound that jangled my nerves all year: an electrified likembe.

The band is Konono No. 1, part of a scene identified by the Belgian Crammed Discs label as “Congotronics,” a distant cousin of Afrobeat, political music first inspired by the Nigerian Fela Kuti, whose sax flirted with Coltrane while his band hustled like James Brown’s; check out Brooklyn’s Antibalas orchestra or Chicago’s Afrobeat Project. Like Afrobeat, Congotronics synthesizes African and Western sensibilities and doesn’t aspire to any kind of purity. Konono’s show features a conga player, a kid with a snare drum and the top half of a high-hat cymbal, a codger playing three cowbells pounded into different timbres, and those likembes–aka thumb pianos, usually a calabash gourd or, in this case, a wood box fitted with thin strips of metal to form keys–plugged into guitar amps.