Daniel Shoemaker Photos
On Friday, as New Haveners sought reprieve from the first day of yet another heatwave, some fortunate city denizens found relief in the (well-air-conditioned) musical bastion, the State House. Within the cool, sublime atmosphere of the venue, audience members traded the heat of the sun’s fusion for another essential process of fusion, as Mali’s BKO Quintet and Hartford’s Klezmer Fusion Collective took the stage to display their unique pastiches of disparate sounds.
The Klezmer Fusion Collective has made honest work of perfecting their eponymous genre, finding a fertile valley, vast and varied, between two seemingly distant musical geographies. What is surprising and superlative about this band, however, cannot be identified by simply reading a concert bill.
The band’s members were positioned evenly across the bright stage in much the same way that their respective instruments are arranged across the sonic spectrum. The group consists of alto saxophone, violin, electric guitar and a drum set of sorts, comprised of a snare drum, a conga, bongos and a couple cymbals, all played by hand. This particular setup accented the functions of each instrument within the jazz-tinged whole. Many of the songs began with slow simmering rhythms and sparse melodies thrust aloft by the buoyant strum of the unadorned electric guitar playing center stage. The adjacent hand percussion was delicate but deliberate, having done as much to accentuate the rhythms as to hold them in place. Melodically, the alto and violin somersaulted through the space created by the rhythm section, always active and agile, but never too busy. For a group that skews relatively high in the sonic spectrum — with not even so much as a bass drum, never mind an actual bass or baritone instrument — they managed to never sound too thin or wispy. Klezmer Fusion Collective managed to create a whole that was sturdier than its parts, forming a propulsive danceable sound that was equal parts intellectual and intuitive.
The evening’s headliners, BKO Quintet, are something of a Malian fusion band. Their sound, as they describe it, is a combination of the griot musical tradition, which employs a small, hand-constructed guitar/banjo analog called the djeli ngoni, and the Bambara hunting music tradition, represented by the much larger bass analog, the donso ngoni, a particularly unwieldy looking instrument with a large resonant gourd-like basin and several long, individually tuned strings. Listeners may not be particularly acquainted with these musical forms, but the marriage of the two is equally easy to dance to and difficult to describe. Imagine a guitarist steeped in Delta blues playing with a bassist inspired by the deep grooves of Parliament, backed by a battery of auxiliary percussion, and fronted by a disciple of James Brown. The music also had the nuanced gallop found frequently in West African music, a swing that has crossed the Atlantic innumerable times on a journey to a contemporary music world that has become increasingly blind to political borders.
The culmination of this musical mélange was a sound that managed to evoke all there is to love about music as an articulation of human experiences. There were lilting sentimental passages that still did not betray the sway of the propulsive rhythm. There were unassailably groovy tunes that partook of pining and loss. Even listeners unfamiliar with BKO’s native French were privy to an intuitive understanding of the music’s disposition. As culture unfolds on an increasingly global scale, Friday’s show at the State House was a refreshing reminder that we navigate the creative world in much the same way we navigate the physical world. Sometimes we learn what roads we travel at the intersections.