The looming threat of a Sunday evening rain didn’t stop a crowd of hundreds from dancing and clapping to a lively collection of music in Lincoln Center’s Damrosch Park Bandshell. In an event dubbed “Live from the Continent,” three musicians heralded by the event’s promoters as the “next wave” of African music performed a small sampling of their latest songs.
“These are the new sounds and the new faces of African music,” said Ngozi Odita of Soceity HAE, who helped produce the event. “They look to Western culture and they look to their own culture to make their own sound.”
It was an evening of firsts for the artists on hand. R&B cross-over artist Iyadede, who hails from Rwanda and now lives in Brooklyn, performed for the first time in New York. South Africa’s electro-dance pop artist Spoek Mathambo’s apperance was his first in the United States.
The concert built up gradually. A predictable but amusing flash mob danced in the aisles of the folding chairs before Iyadede opened the evening, waving flags from the wide variety of African nations represented in the diaspora of the audience.
The Rwandan singer offered a collection of gentle R&B tunes, including a few new songs that she had written recently. Her voice was often too quiet for the large space at Lincoln Center’s southern plaza, but the singer’s interpretation of a song in French called “Across the Sea” showed her playful, lyrical side.
Spoek Mathambo’s set was a bit rowdier. His band was a three-man affair — the singer included — with a modern drum kit on one side and a saxophone-playing soundboard mixer on the other. His upbeat, politically-tinged music brought the audience to its feet at the foot of the stage.
Mathambo’s gentle chiding also helped turn the event into an impromptu dance party.
“Don’t be afraid, don’t be shy,” he said at the beginning of one song. “I heard this was some kind of African get together. What kind of African get together has people sitting down?”
Mathambo’s music was a nice segue way between Iyadede and the evening’s headliner, Ghanian rapper Blitz the Ambassador.
Blitz’s band dressed in mostly identical black suits, and his horn section was noisy and tightly choreographed as they provided a visual and musical background to the hip-hop artist’s funk-inspired rhymes.
His sing-songy delivery gave many of his songs the feeling of crisscrossed genre mash-ups, swiftly moving from traditional hip-hop to Nigerian high life and hard Afro-funk. Blitz invited his audience on a narrative musical journey, exploring the roots of rap and funk music around the world and the African continent.
