The precocious progeny of James Brown's soul and the late Fela Kuti's kinetic African beat, Anitbalas Afrobeat Orchestra emanates joyous, sensual music built around improvisation.  The band's limbre jams are driven by mutating, rhythmic figures of drums and horns while the guitars lay down simple, repeating lines that serve as the songs' core. 
   The group numbers as many as 20 people, though generally not more than a dozen of them tour because of the economics of going on the road with such a large act.  But watching these musicians on-stage communicating and feeding off thegenerous vibe of the audience is an incredible sight.  Martin Anitbalas, the band's founder and leader, explains that in addition to a series of hand signals, the musicians rely on various musical cues they've developed to follow the arrangements' improvised movements.
   "We reach into our bag of tricks and pull out some of our favorites.  We throw those in behind different people's solos or on top of a drum break after it's gone on for a while where it's just horns and drums," Anitbalas explains.  "That combination is really crazy, because it's no eletric instruments at that point and by itself has a certain rawness to it that people respond to in a different way.  It's like getting your coffee withoutcream or sugar; you taste it in a whole new way."
   While Kuti and Brown are major touchstones for the band, Antibalas Afrobeat explores a breadth of influences that reflect the diverse musical tastes and backgrounds of its members.  "You'll hear little bits maybe of Lee Perry, or King Tubby if the keyboard player is doing a solo and cranks up the echo at the end of it.  You'll hear elements of Ethiopian composer Mulatu in some particular guitar line, you might hear a little nit of Funkadelic or a little bit of Haitian street drumming or Cuban spiritual drumming." Antibalas says.  "Each member has a wide range of influences that brings in rhythms or vocabularies that are appropriate to Afrobeat.  We don't try to create some pastiche of disparate msuical parts.  It's definitely not world fusion."
   The idea for the group germinated in New York, when Antibalas came under the thrall of funk and soul.  While he had played saxophone in junior high, itwas never something he coinsidered pursuing until college, when guitarist Gabriel Ross and trombonist Mike Wagner turned him on to bands such as Parliament and Cymande.
   "Cymande is like the Grateful Dead if they were from the West Indies, these West Indian guys playing this Afro-funk but with this whole jammy sound to it: crazy reverb and guitars," Anitbalas says.  "A lot of them were Rastafarians, and they had these traditional spiritual songs.  That was definitely a heavy, heavy influence."
   "I grew up listening to a lot of hip-hop, and when I was 19, I started digging and listening less to hip-hop and more to the music they were borrowing from to make it, all the funk and jazz from the late '60s and early '70s," he adds.  "That's when I started to hear saxophone for the first time, and I was like, 'This is how I want to play.  This is cool.'"
   Anitbalas Afrobeat formed in 1998 and quickly developed a cult following around New York.  The next year, the gourp released its debut album, Liberation Afrobeat, followed by Live in New York! Summer 1999.  With its second studio album, 2001's Liberation Afrobeat, Vol. 1, the band began to come into its own, producing an infectious, largely instrumental amalgam of the primal and the soulful.  Last year, Anitbalas released its third album, Talkatif, which reflected an evolution in the band's sound.
   "What's developed since te last album, and continues to develop more by leaps and bouncs. is the whole vocal element of the music," Anitbalas says.  "The vocals are even more fleshed-out, and when you see us live now, two-thirds of our tunes have some kind of vocal element to them."
   The live performances are what powers the band, finanacially, emotionally and creatively.  The studio albums possibly capture the energy of the interplay between the musicians and audience.
   "It's collaborative music.  It's like we're trying to light the room with this energy," Anitbalas notes.  "Say you need 100 watts of musical collaborative energy to light up the room.  And we're, say, 60 watts of that, and the audience is 40.  In a very friendly way, we're prodding each other on through the encouragement for us to play harder and them to dance harder.  This is an ongoing thing passing back and forth."
   "That's why it's hard to re-create that in the studio," he continues.  "instead, it becomes an entirely different goal-- to create this intense and flawless musical product for people to consume at a later date.  There is also a message to be delivered.  In the studio, we're just singing into a microphone, where as when we're out with an audience, we can see people responding to that message and know at the end of the night that we passed it on."
   That is perhaps Antibalas' most rewarding element. Forged in this musical crucible of percolating rhythm, positivity and bubbling audience passion is a message of community and connection that goes far beyond the typical indie-rock nod fest.
   "It's a gathering.  We're not some minstrels there on-stage to entertain people.  People come out because there's something deeper than that," Antibalas explains.  "Someoneactually told me they suffered from chronic bronchitis until they started going to our shows.  I'm not going to claim responsibility, because healing in general is something that is collaborative, just like our music.  Health isn't found in a bill or a book in a doctor's office; it's found in every single one of us.  It wasn't intended.  I didn't have a conscious purpose: 'Let's create a healing music.'  But people have expressed it's had that kind of effect on them.
   "Part of it, I think, is the environment we create," he adds, "it's a safe space. It's something that people, for the most part, don't experience in the outside world.  They experience a cruel, harsh world where everyone is trying to make a buck off each other.  So when you get out of that and go to some performance that's not just a musical performance, where you find everyone around you is acting so cool, it's, 'What's wrong with the rest of the world that it's not like this all the time?' "
   Like George Clinton before them, the members of Anitbalas have discovered therapeutic, self-perpetuating energy of a room filled with joyful, booty-shaking indiviuals grooving to the same beat and breathing in the shared warmth it creates.
 "It's fun to knowthere are so many different ways of communicating besides just verbal communication and, a lot of times, ending up with the feeling that that communication is even more effectivethan verbal communication," Antibalas says.  "It's like, 'Why are we lost in thw orld of words when we could be talking to each otherwith notes?' "