Allison Hadley Photo
How do you spread information without WhatsApp, Facebook, or Instagram? Tal National provided Cafe Nine’s Saturday night crowd with a most effective answer: a big drum. Crack, crack, crack, crack!
Tal National, from Niger, are a band with big everything. Big grooves. Big riffs. Big presence. Big ideas. Some bands play at you, some bands play for you. Tal National plays around you, with you and through you, in the process blurring the border between stage and audience. On Saturday, this included not only crossing the border physically to solo, drum, or dance, but also to teach the audience geography lessons. Can you name the capital of Niger, or the river that runs through it? If you went to this show, you can.
The band’s sound is a reduction of every essential oil that can be squeezed from a phenomenal breadth of musical heritages, in a process of stirring and distilling flavors familiar to their native Nigerien palette and others born of other continents and decades. The tight staccato grooves of James Brown, windswept hammer-ons from the dunes of Tuareg guitar, the unfettered optimism of highlife, the bump of Afrobeat and the scorching solos of ‘60s psychedelia all featured prominently in Tal National’s set. However, it seems abundantly clear that in the band members’ own eyes, Tal National are just a professional rock band.
“In Niger we play for five hours, so an hour and fifty minutes is like a warm-up for us,” lead guitarist and de facto ambassador Hamadal Issoufou Moumine, known professionally as Almeida, exclaimed gleefully to the dance-beleaguered, panting audience. Almeida’s comfort with a crowd was immediately apparent. His genial warmth as host and self-conscious guitar god antics belied his apparent mastery of jurisprudence; the authors would like to note that Almeida is also a judge in Niger and we have newfound respect for both the man and his profession.
The night began with the more laid back, tropical vibes of the Connecticut-based Southwind Social Club, ushering us on a journey far from the sticky swelter of an early August night. Southwind Social Club swayed back and forth between Afro-Caribbean rhythms and their continental cousins like a well-placed beachside hammock, ranging from Ebo Taylor to Michael Jackson. The band featured, amongst other things, an unironic keytar. The outfit cleared the audience for travel — and travel we did.
Tal National’s band members collectively announced their arrival via chant in their native tongue, to the strident clang of an extremely beaten cowbell. Whatever the quintet excitedly exclaimed, the translation didn’t matter, because the energy was the point, and it was well made. That energy never relented, from synchronized steps on stage to storytelling of a time where the Big Drum was the only way to hunt down wayward goats. Of course, there were other drums — the talking, the snare, and the audience’s feet. We stomped, clapped, and danced (at the behest of our emcee, collectively pantomiming a frog and a camel, and culminating in a collective “happy dance” — “open hands, open heart”).
And that is what really set Tal National apart: the band was remarkably interactive. On Saturday’s show — the band’s third time visiting New Haven — the band members took time to make eye contact and dance a little harder, or venture into the circle of revelers a meter or two from the stage. They brought not only their music, phenomenal in its own right, but a generosity of spirit rarely seen from stage acts, and Cafe Nine provided a perfectly intimate venue to create a night where that stage had no boundaries.