Monday, March 06, 2006

(AUDIO!!) Langerado Countdown - 4 Days!

I was bad this weekend, and didn't make the updates I had planned on. But I'm going to make up for it with a plethora of previews of bands that are playing this weekend at the Langerado Music Festival in sunny Sunrise, FL (no joke, that's the name of the town. It is located right next to Plantation--P.C. police take note!).

Today I decided to drop a little Afro-Beat on y'all. (And the show is from last year's Langerado, ta-boot!) For the uninitiated, Afro-Beat may be the most danceable genre of music on the planet. Take the tribal rhythms of African music and add the funky rhythms of late 1960s era James Brown and early 70s Parliament, and you have the music of Fela Anikulapo Kuti.

I'm not going to go into the importance of this man on the music, politics and culture of not only Africa, but the world, as there are true scholars who have been working on this (and will continue to do so) for years. You've heard people talk about the socio-political contributions of Bob Marley?

Multiply his impact by, oh, let's say one hundred times and there you have Fela. I strongly recommend any of his dozens of albums.

Fela Anikulapo Kuti, a.k.a. the Black President.

But enough digression, I'm here to write about a band that is playing at Langerado this weekend. Unfortunately, Fela passed away in 1997 after a long battle with HIV/AIDS.

But his legacy is strong, and the torch has been passed to the Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra, a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic musical collective from the long lost land of Brooklyn, NY. These guys bring it, and they bring it hard.

Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra singer/conga player Duke Amayo with a very intense look on his face at the Langerado Music Festival in Sunrise, FL. March 12, 2005.

I actually was very fortunate when it comes to this band. I was still in university when they were signed to Montreal's own Ninja Tune Records, and to celebrate the momentous occasion, the label booked the group (I believe they were at 13 or 14 pieces for this show) into the tiny Pub Quartier Latin. Luckily, I was on the guest, but buzz was high and there was a line around the corner. So many people were there that management attempted to clear out the room between each set to pack more people in.

The narrow room was jammed, and the band had to ask the normally nic-fitting Montrealers to refrain from smoking due to the fact it would irritate the horn blowers. So we didn't smoke, and were richly rewarded with a most explosive spectacle of tightly played tunes.

Since then, I've seen the band in packed venues and open festival fields (as well as in an academic setting when they dropped serious knowledge on Fela and the use of music as a form of social protest at a symposium I attended a few years back).

The show I'm linking here (thanks, Internet Archive!) is from last year's Langerado. Unfortunately, some sort of technical difficulties cut short the group's set, but they still sounded awesome, and I shook it like the white boy I am.

Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra - March 12, 2005

Now the only problem is going to be deciding between Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! and Antibalas, as they're playing at the same time...

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