Lost Tribe Tells Musicians’ Stories

The Lost Tribe’s Jocelyn Pleasant greeted audience members as she made her way through the crowd at Best Video on Saturday night to gather up her bandmates and ready them for the evening ahead. Her love of community became the theme of the night, as the band convened with friends and fellow artists to celebrate connections and conversations through words, music, and film. 

Pleasant’s band on Saturday was advertised as ​“The Lost Five” — those five being Pleasant on percussion, Michael Carabello on keys, Joel Hewitt on bass, Karim Rome on sax and percussion, and Asaad Jackson (a.k.a. DJ Stealth) on turntables and percussion. Guests for the night included Dylan Olympi McDonnell on flute and sax, Tyler Jenkins on guitar, and Tang Sauce and Ghazi Omair on vocals. Each performer added to the conversation and melded with the music nearly seamlessly throughout the evening, which also included a preview of a film titled Diaspora Stories Hartford that Pleasant has been working on as a part of her PhD program in ethnomusicology.

The proceedings began with Pleasant and Jackson only on percussion, accompanied by prerecorded snippets of conversation about hip hop and music and culture. Soon after Pleasant banged her drumsticks together, summoning Carbello, Hewiit, Rome and McDonnell to the stage to join in. Each one stepped in to join the sounds. First came keys, then bass. With a ​“hey” from Pleasant, Carabello layered in more sound, followed by flute and more percussion. When Pleasant started a double clap and nodded to the audience to join in, they did immediately and with joy. 

The next two pieces, according to Pleasant, were a homage to West Africa. She said she had learned them from Mamady Kouyate of the Mandingo Ambassadors, with whom she has played before and would be joining again for a show at Best Video on Dec. 10. She noted that the piece, originally played on guitar, was ​“adapted to this band.” The songs had the mesmerizing quality of all Kouyate’s playing, but with a fresh perspective, once again steeped in community as well as reverence. 

“Its not a Lost Tribe gig if there’s not a lot of guests,” Pleasant announced, before introducing Ghazi Omair, who would be performing a piece by Sekou Sundiata titled ​“Blink Your Eyes” along to ​“Say Their Names,” one of the band’s 2020 releases and ​“one of the ways The Lost Tribe was able to kind of put our foot into what was going on and make our mark.”

“We’re going to play the music … while I let Ghazi come with his particular spoken word, his contribution to that idea and to that thought,” she added. The resulting collaboration saw each piece elevate the other, the band’s rhythms punctuating such lines from Omair as ​“it all depends on the skin, it all depends on the skin, it all depends on the skin you’re living in.”

For the next piece, Pleasant announced that the band would be moving into a ​“little something different, a little bit of hip hop.”

“A concept I like to work with in this group is the idea of storytelling, and not only storytelling, but this understanding and this idea of this kind of feedback loop in the African diaspora of different cultures and different musics and different people and customs, going back and forth from the Caribbean to the U.S. to Africa to Europe to everywhere, and everybody borrowing each other’s ideas, and this group is literally a manifestation of that, I like to think,” Pleasant said. Noting that ​“one of the manifestations of Africa and diaspora is hip hop,” she then introduced hip hop artist Tang Sauce, who joined Omair and the band for the next performance — a joyful take on the Roots’s ​“Proceed.” All the members onstage, who seemed to be having as much fun as the audience members watching them. It spanned nearly 15 minutes and is available to watch in the video below. 

The band then took a break, during which Pleasant showed the trailer for Diaspora Stories Hartford, a docuseries that she and the band had put together documenting the arts and a number of artists in Hartford (where Pleasant and a number of band members were born and raised) funded by the Hartford-based Independent Artists Fund.

“One of my goals is trying to understand and document and talk about the trajectory of African drumming and dance in the United States,” Pleasant said; she is currently working on a PhD from Wesleyan in ethnomusicology. ​“You know you can go somewhere else and you can talk to various people and you can document communities all you want, but something I was interested in was documenting what was going on in my backyard.”

The trailer included discussions with Abu Alvin Carter, Sr., Alvin Carter, Jr., and Inara Ramin — three African drummers from Hartford — as well as Jolet Creary, owner of Studio 860, a hip hop dance studio, and Damian Curtis, a musician who has recorded music with the band, about their journeys and their goals , also discussing ​“what Hartford has to do with it, why Hartford, why do all of us end up going back?”

When the trailer ended, an audience member shouted out ​“I wanna see more.” Pleasant said there would be so much more coming soon, hopefully February or March 2023, with screening at different events, including talkbacks and performances that would be accessible to all. She also said she hoped it was ​“the first of many.”

“I’m sure all of us know somebody who deserves to have their story told, needs to have their story told, needs to have it documented, written down, on tape somewhere,” she added. 

When the band returned from break, Pleasant said that next set developed from discussions about where the name The Lost Tribe came from, and would include pieces that came from those conversations and developed from ​“that spoken word interview documentary kind of style.” The first one was called ​“Vision,” developed from Omair listening to a piece and then coming back with his own contribution, adding in such words as ​“Lost, but still a tribe.”

Omair took a seat for the he band’s 2021 release ​“ReDefinition,” which saw many audience members grooving along to the beat (including former Best Video executive director Hank Hoffman). He returned to freestyle with Tang Sauce as well as perform his piece ​“Fugitive Rhythm,” where he paid homage to all the ways rhythm came to us and how it must be celebrated, not suppressed. 

“This rhythm has to be unchained,” he said. ​“This rhythm has to be spoken.”

Pleasant asked the crowd if they wanted one more, and was answered with a resounding yes. The final number would be a combination of the song ​“Effie” by Max Roach and Omair’s piece ​“The Revolution Will Not Be Commercialized.”

“You know Gil Scott’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised?” said Omair. ​“We decided to update that.” And update it they did, with samples of that Scott piece added by DJ Stealth and a steady build up of sound and words referencing all the ways in which we are informed and distracted these days, culminating in the phrase ​“the revolution will not be streamed, because the revolution will be live,” — an apt way to end an evening that exemplified the importance of community, conversation, and real time interaction with and love for one other.