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Feature on Barbes (Hazmat's label)
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Newsday, Feature on Barbes (Hazmat's label) >>
Small room, global roots
Marty Lipp
August 20, 2006
In a city of immigrants, roots music can look as multifarious as the faces on an F train out of Brooklyn.
Just off the F line, a block from the Seventh Avenue stop in Park Slope, the vest-pocket club Barbès plays roots music from around the world with a twist - the performers tinker with tradition, making it distinctly their own.
The club, founded three years ago by French musicians Olivier Conan and Vincent Douglas, presents two shows a night of varied music in a back room the size of a good-sized living room. With its tin ceilings, dark-wood bar and narrow front barroom, Barbès has an old-time neighborhood feel, complementing the acoustic music that animates it.
Conan said he's happy with the small space, but has now launched a record label to bring some of the bands that regularly play there to a larger audience.
Mark Moran, of SlavicSoul Party, said Barbès "feels small and intimate, but worldly and diverse at the same time. It's very comfortable, but it's a serious listening room.
"Slavic Soul Party has been a Tuesday night fixture at Barbès - 110 weeks and counting. On one recent Tuesday, the band slowly coalesced under a vintage "Hotel D'Orsay" sign where the stage would be - if there were a stage. The members chatted and did several rehearsal-style starts on a new tune, eventually - without fanfare, or even being introduced - starting to play for the congenial party. In short order, the group was swinging hard, albeit it to the complex time signatures of Balkan music.
The weekly gig, Moran said, gives the band a place to relax and experiment, to recharge its batteries. He describes the band as Balkan-influenced, but not an attempt to be traditional. Rejecting the label of "world music," Moran said, "we're creating very local music," using New York musicians who are influenced by the myriad sounds around them, whether it's New Orleans jazz or Mexican banda.
On their Barbès album, "Bigger," the nine-member group mostly limns the big, fast sound of Balkan brass bands, but plays either original compositions or their own arrangements of traditional tunes. On occasion, the players' jazz chops come to the fore, closing the album with a funky tune by The Meters.
Similarly, the group Hazmat Modine is another Barbès regular that takes a borderless approach to regional music. The group's name refers to a "modine," a commercial heater that blows lots of hot air, not unlike the group, which has two harmonicas, a tuba and occasionally a contrabass saxophone. "We're a band of unwanted instruments," said founder Wade Schuman, noting their use of a cimbalom, a claviola and a sarrusaphone.
The resulting sound evokes old blues and jazz, and even some inchoate rock, but it's subtly reinvented through a prism of non-American music: calypso, Middle Eastern, Cuban. The group even plays several songs accompanied by the bullfroggy voices of Huun-Huur-Tu, Tuvan throat singers from outside Mongolia.
"I abhor mindless orthodoxy," said Schuman. "I think it's misguided.... The whole point of American music is this phenomenon of cross-cultural pollination. That's what the genius of American culture has been, really.
"To mark the release of Hazmat Modine's wonderful debut, "Bahamut" (seven years after the band formed), Barbès is "going to the city," and having a launch party at S.O.B.'s in Manhattan on Sept. 24, including Slavic Soul Party, Hazmat Modine and Las Rubias del Norte, a group that plays retro pan-Latin styles, but is fronted by two classically trained singers.
Conan, who plays the guitar-like cuatro with Las Rubias, knows firsthand the rough life of a musician, so his club and label try to give a home to dedicated players and "at least treat them well" by giving them a platform to reach open-minded audiences.
Speaking about the club, Slavic Soul Party's Moran said, "You don't know what's going to be there, but you know it's going to be good." 08/20/06 >> go there
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