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'Daxaar', 'Steps' Capture World's Beat
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Mix Magazine, 'Daxaar', 'Steps' Capture World's Beat >>
World music is probably today's most innovative contemporary genre. Over the past several years scores of releases have combined various disparate styles to create fresh new takes on indigenous forms spiced with rock, jazz, funk, soul, electronics, ambient, bass'n' drums, hip hop or folk.
Examples include Eastern European/ Romany brass jazzed up with soul and New Orleans funk, brazillian pop hip-hoping with rap beats and Mexican bands forging new sounds out of brit prog - rock.
Two new and totally different releases showcase how creative world music can be.
One by the Bronx - born swiss resident Steve Ried, "Daxaar" has the vetern soul / jazz drummer and former Black Panther assembling a musical crew at a studio in Senegal's capital of Dakar.
Another, Deepak Rams "Steps", features the virtuoso bansuri player playing his centuries old Indian bamboo flute into contempary jazz. The bansuri is the instrument shown being played by various Hindu gods in stone friezes, statues and icons.
The ancient wind instrument has been linked to classic Indian and new age music, but here Ram, a south african of indian ethnicity, performs jazz classics by John Coltrane, Miles Davis, George Gershwin and Darius Brubeck, along with the two originals. The bansuri, with its limited range, isn't as versatile as the flute. So, backed by a guitar-bass-drums combo offering empathetic support, Ram bends and twists his notes to fit each song's lofty jazz patterns to create new takes on a set of well known bopping chestnuts.
With the instrument's deep, sultry and resonate sweetnes, "summertime" gets an exotic feel, "My funny Valentine" sounds like an east asian lament, 'Tranes "Naima" follows an impressionistic path, and Brubeck's "October" gets a slightly samba sway. Going from a jazzed -up Indian instrument by way of South Africa, transition to Senegal where Ried and his combo of keyboardist Borls Netsvetaevand electronics master Kieren Hebden (a.k.a. Four Tet) team with a cadre of top West African players. They create live-in-the-studio sound that combines afrobeat and indian and african rhythms with fusion jazz while the late jazz organ pioneer Herbie Hancocks Headhunters "Bitches Brew."
Ried and percussionist Khadim Badij lay down upfront, criss-cross rhythms while Hebden floats effects and turntable scratching and Netvetaev injects cool Hammond B3 organ and electric piano grooves.
The album is full of long, sometime spacey jazz-rock-funk jams, but the effort is hardly scattershot or aimless. One can sense the musicians listening to and challenging each other with showboating, riffing, and harmonic support.
Both "Daxaar" and "Steps" showcase how the stylistic cross-pollination of world music genres combine and clash to create new ways to groove in the 21st century.
02/01/08
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