Brian Slattery Photos
Salwa — full name, Salwa Abdussabur — shot a smile from Cafe Nine’s stage Tuesday night. “I’ve always wanted to do the music thing — so I’m doing it,” they said, to laughter from the gathering crowd. “But words are very important to me.”
On the eve of a trip to Los Angeles, Abdussabur explained how they started off as a spoken-word poet in seventh grade, winning their first slam by taking down classmates who had teased them for wearing a hijab. Now, with musical compatriots Tyler on guitar and Gritz on keyboard, Abdussabur was heading off the written word and into freestyle.
“When I perform, I tune into a vibe,” they said.
The New Haven-raised Salwa was one of three performers to be taking a physical and musical trip from the stage of the State Street club for a night of R&B that ranged from slow-simmering jams to swinging beats to full-on bangers.
First up was the Connecticut-based Brain Bank — Sephrina on vocals, Sean on keys and vocals, Gabe on keys, Skye on bass, and Ben on drums (all of them opting to use first names only) — who surprised the earliest arrivals to the club, including Salwa herself, with tight, sharp grooves and sinuous melodies. The band’s songs had a knack for shifting rhythms that moved from sparse yet complex polyrhythms to straight-ahead driving beats on choruses. Ben and Skye as rhythm section were glued together, while Sean and Gabe on keys unleashed a panoply of sounds that often made it seem like Brain Bank was a bigger band. Sephrina’s vocals floated over the top, her breezily delivery accentuated by the near-constant smile on her face as she made eye contact with seemingly each person in the audience, recognizing everyone with a smile.
Next was Salwa, who introduced themselves boldly to the now quite large audience with a freestyle that let them swoop across their singing range. Almost everyone who was talking during the set break stopped to listen to what they had to say.
“Let’s slow it down here,” Salwa said to Tyler and Gritz. “I want to get your attention.” Salwa already had it, even by then, as they prowled the stage to spit or sat at the edge of the stage to croon, while Tyler and Gritz held down lush grooves on organ and guitar.
The trip to Los Angeles, Salwa explained, was the beginning of a new chapter. Calling themselves an “artivist,” Salwa said that “my black voice, my queerness, my everythingness, will be a part of everything I do from now until the end of time.” They ended with a pairing of the personal and emotive and the social and spiritual, blending together the Bee Gees’ “How Deep Is Your Love?” and “We Shall Overcome” into a melange that was the perfect capper to an intriguing, risk-taking set.
“Thank y’all for vibing wiith me,” Salwa said. “Thank you for letting me make mistakes. Thank you for letting me be.”
Boulevards — a.k.a. Jamil Rashad — didn’t so much hit the stage as smack it. With support from a guitarist who could move from gritty scratches to Hendrix-style wails, an indefatigable drummer, and a host of backup tracks to fill out the sound, Rashad married old-school grooves with a more modern sound. The first five or six flew by with almost no stopping as Rashad worked up a sweat with dancing and treated the microphone like James Brown used to, bringing it close to his mouth to make every pop and gasp sound huge.
Many in the audience couldn’t resist any longer and jumped to their feet, getting closer to the stage to the dance. In a break in the action to slow down the groove, Rashad showed he had the talk as well as the walk.
“We’re not done yet,” he said. “We’re going to take you on that ride. Get on board that cruise ship and explore the seven seas of funk. Sit back and enjoy the cosmos, you dig?”
Rashad, mid-tour from his base in North Carolina, then said that he “didn’t come here to preach. I came here to tell you a story.” It turned out to be a personal one, of drug abuse and rehab and climbing his way back out and the lessons he learned along the way.
“Ain’t nobody going to give you nothing. You got to go out and get it,” he said. “The only thing holding me back is myself.”
Then the band turned loose the rhythm again, and the dancing started up once more. “Hope you all liked that ride,” Rashad said with a twinkle in his eye. “We ain’t done.”