Jason Lapierre and Dani Haims
“Chicken Waffles” starts with a chirp and a coo, and then the percussion lays down a slow, heavy groove. There’s talking in the background, but the rhythms persist. Then a guitar slithers in with a pulsing three-note figure that gives all the harmonic structure needed for a melodica to float a haunting, chord-based melody over the top of it all. The talking in the background seems to subside as the sound develops. The guitar fleshes out its line. The melodica disappears and a glockenspiel takes over. All the while the percussion never misses a beat. And that’s even before the chanting.
The song is the first cut from “Live At Cafe Nine,” the latest recording from Klezmer Fusion Collective — Elijah Atwood on guitar and vocals, Derrik Bosse on congas, drums, and vocals, Jared Schmidt on violin, percussion, and vocals, and Taylor Warinsky on saxophone, glockenspiel, melodica, percussion, and vocals — and it ends with an altogether appropriate howl of applause.
Klezmer Fusion Collective traffics in a sound that draws from cultures around the world without falling into the homogenizing trap of “world music.” There is a distinct Latin flavor to the percussion that suggests Bosse has done his homework in dissecting how those rhythms work. Atwood’s sparse guitar work likewise partakes of south-of-the-border rhythms. But there’s something pleasantly cosmic about the melodic uses these rhythms are put to. As the chant in “See Hear Feel” says, “I can see the vision / I hear the music / I can feel the presence / From the other side now.” The next cut, “Night Flute,” wouldn’t be too out of place on a Peruvian record.
The band makes good on its name with “Freylekh Shamona,” which employs a distinctly Middle Eastern mode to create an urgent yet spacey jam, featuring some fine saxophone work from Warinsky. “You want to talk about it,” the band chants at the apex of the song. “You want to talk with me.” The band doesn’t elucidate on what the subject of the conversation is, but the song makes you want to know.
“Encore? OK, we’ll do one,” one of the band members jokes to introduce its last song, “That Homosapien Over There,” which returns to a galloping Latin feel, the sax and violin buoyed by bubbling guitar while the drums keep things steady. (That this is all done without a bass player is pretty impressive, and lends a refreshing sense of air and space to the band’s sound.)
Throughout the recording, one can hear the burbling conversation in the club around the band — not nearly loud enough to be distracting, but present enough to ensure that we know this is a live recording. As such, it’s a document as much of the vibe in Cafe Nine on the night of June 20, 2019 as it is of the band’s performance. It was chilled out, yet far-ranging, and just when you thought that the audience might not be paying attention, the conclusions to each song were met with hearty cheers. The effortlessness of the album suggests that more bands in town should try it. Sometimes it’s great to record an album piece by painstaking piece, getting everything right before you let it out into the world. And sometimes it’s great to just set up a microphone or two, play your best, and see what happens.