Especially when Nigerian soldiers took off with their passports at the Benin/Nigeria border. The band did what any Americans raised on "The A-Team" would do -- they chased them down with their big green and purple bus.

It was all a misunderstanding, or perhaps a bit of intimidation from the soldiers who -- like all officials they ran into, according to band cofounder Ezra Gale -- were looking for a bribe. They gave the soldiers some Aphrodesia cassettes and got their passports back.

"Yeah, it was a little hair-raising," Gale said from his home in San Francisco. "But I don't want to complain about it too much, because that's the kind of thing Nigerians deal with all the time. Of course we were bigger targets being a bus with a bunch of white people from America in it."

The band, which will play at 8 p.m. Friday at Arcadia Creek Festival Place during the Taste of Kalamazoo, is based on a love of African sounds. In 2000, bassist Gale, singers Lara Maykovich and Maya Dorn, and a growing host of horn players, guitarists and percussionists attempted to play music from a land they, except for Maykovich, had never been to.

Maykovich had lived in a Ghanaian fishing village in 1996-97, and learned to sing in the native languages. Later, she and Dorn went to Cuba to study Afro-Cuban sounds and dance.

Aphrodesia became a mix of Ghanaian highlife (upbeat horn/guitar pop that's been around since the '20s), Nigerian afrobeat (driving funk created by Fela Kuti), Afro-Cuban and American funk and jazz. The two singers often incorporate African dance, face paint and fashions in their shows. Invited by a Ghanaian band to hop over the Atlantic for a little tour, Aphrodesia jumped at the chance.

In Ghana's capital city, Accra, they hoped to hear highlife, Gale said, "and what we discovered is what they listen to is hip-hop and reggae, like the rest of the world."

The smaller villages listened to the older music, he found, but people in the big cities "are immersed in the same global culture that we are, obviously with different influences and a different perspective. But we found out they like Jay-Z, Kanye West and Bob Marley."

The people were skeptical when they found the Americans weren't going to be playing any hip-hop.

"We encountered a lot of curiosity the whole trip. Certainly a lot of 'What are you white people doing here?' But once we started playing, people were really into it," Gale said.
In Ghana, when Maykovich and Dorn sang traditional lyrics in the Ga language, the audiences went wild.

"When they saw us treating (their music) with so much respect, and the fact that we'd made the journey to come over there, meant a lot to them," Gale said.

They bribed their way to Nigeria to play at The Shrine Lagos, which is owned by Femi Kuti (son of Fela). The audience looked at them with folded arms, but Femi gave Aphrodesia his approval by performing with them and the audience began dancing. Afterward, Gale realized, "They were so happy because they know how hard it is to get to Lagos; they know how crazy it is for an American to get over there."

The police and soldiers the band had to deal with were a gun-toting, bribe-taking pain. But when Aphrodesia got to communicate with music, they found that Nigerians and Ghanians "were the best people in the world," Gale said.

-by Mark Wedel