Chris Kompanek

While temperatures dipped well below freezing on Sunday night, it was easy to forget winter completely inside the sold out Webster Hall where world music fans packed the venue’s three spaces to hear a wide variety of bands that hailed from Columbia, Honduras, Brazil, and many other warmer places.

I arrived just after 7pm, in time to catch most of Rhythm of Rajasthan, the opening act in the main Ballroom. These talented musicians traveled from the Great Thar Desert in western Rahasthan, India to play their rousing native songs on bowed sarangi (fiddle), algozas (double flutes), and a wide range of percussion that kept the room pulsing. A female dancer in colorful, traditional garb added to the merriment.

As soon as the set ended, I popped down to the basement Studio Room to catch the New York olo debut of Hawaiian native Kaumakaiwa Kanaka’ole. His highly stylized voice captured many in the crowded room. One of the great things about Globalfest is the freedom to wander fairly effortlessly between the rooms, and as I made my way back upstairs, I was rewarded by a lively performance in the first floor Marlin Room.

Aurelio & Garifuna Soul filled in last minute for the Creole Choir of Cuba, but you’d never know it listening to their ebulliently confident frontman Aurelio Martinez (whose resume includes a recent collaboration with popular Senegalese singer Youssou N’dour) plow through a series of upbeat Caribbean sounds, carrying us off on a tropical vacation and earning the calls for an encore when his time was up – an announcement by festival organizers later revealed that he will be playing Zankel Hall later this year.

One of my favorites of the evening was RAM, a Haitian supergroup who respond to the unthinkable horrors their country has endured with a defiant bombastic energy that speaks to Leonard Bernstein’s quote, “this will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.” The band’s name is the initials of its frontman, Richard Auguste Morse, a Puerto Rican-born Haitian American who grew up in Connecticut, earned a degree in Anthropology from Princeton, and moved to Haiti in the late eighties.

He formed RAM shortly thereafter with a group of Haitian musicians, whose culturally diverse sound – even the Lincolnesque top hat Morse wears on stage – is reflective of a life lived in disparate societies. His music combines the driving riffs of rock and roll with Haitian Voodoo ceremonial and folkloric influences – a leading force of a genre known as rasin. The style is perhaps best realized in one of their most recognizable songs, Ibo Lele (Dreams Come True), which was featured on the soundtrack for Philadelphia.

Columbia’s LA-33 earned praise in the world salsa scene for their rendition of Henry Mancini’s Pink Panther theme, and it’s easy to see why. They use the rhythmic structure of salsa to set the beat and enliven the classic film theme, while allowing space for improvisation, courtesy of the group’s impressive brass section. The joyous arrangement by Sergio Mejia had a number of young couples dancing near the front of the stage, sometimes switching partners mid-swirl. LA-33 solidified their status as the party band of the fest with an equally rousing take on the Police’s “Roxanne”. The ample horns infuse the chorus with a punchiness lacking in the original. When Sting finishes his Symphonicity tour next month, he might want to consider hooking up with these Columbian salsa mavens.

As the evening came to an end, it was hard to believe that I’d spent more than fours hours on my feet, trekking between the different stages, occasionally resting in an open seat. A glaze washed over me along with the evening’s pulsating soundtrack that carried me out into the cold, dreaming of escaping to the tropics.