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November 13-19, 2008
buzz@boulderweekly.com
The world stage
Toubab Krewe brings North Carolina and Africa together at last
by Dave Kirby
The anti-genre
Portugal. The Man defies categories and expectations with their new album
by Alan Sculley
The world stage
Toubab Krewe brings North Carolina and Africa together at last
by Dave Kirby
We caught up to Toubab Krewe guitarist/instrumentalist Justin Perkins last week in LA, weaving his way amongst the fallen angels to negotiate an iced coffee transaction, the grey-noise hiss of humanity and traffic in the background.
And nailing down an interview with these guys isn’t easy — the day we caught him for a 15-minute phoner was three months into a six-gig-a-week tour that eventually brings them to Colorado for a trio of shows, kicking off at the Fox Thursday night.
The North Carolina franchise — stalwart members of both the stateside groovefest circuit and international world music scene by virtue of their widely respected trade in West African/Western rock fusion — have invested themselves in festival and club wanderlust so heavily that it took three years for the band to follow up their debut CD with Live At The Orange Peel, slated for national release later this month.
And even then, as the title reveals, it’s a live album.
“We’re doing 200 shows a year at this point, so finding time to get into the studio isn’t that easy. Even so, we managed to get a week last year when we actually went in to start recording some of the new music that had collected over time.
“And, y’know, it was kind of hard coming off after so many live shows, all that energy from the audience and the different environments we played in. It’s sort of a level of comfort thing for us, I think. We just never managed to get this material to sound the same in the safe environment. I don’t want to say ‘sterile,’ but that’s kind of what it was. When we got finished with it, it came out OK, but we all decided it would sound better if we did it live. It just seemed like the natural thing for this stuff.”
So the band assembled for a two-night New Year’s stint at the Orange Peel club in their hometown of Asheville. Compared to their eponymous debut, well crafted and relatively precise in its elastic and relentlessly inquisitive re-imagining of West African pop standards, the live CD comes at you with a fusillade of guitars and drums, heavier and more confident. Hundreds of live shows downstream from their first CD, the experience is evident.
Perkins’ reverb-soaked guitar and kamelengoni lines come across liberated and fiercer and more vengeful, the twin percussion attack propelling the band into dizzying jam passages, jam rock here colliding and dissolving into Malinese bounce there. The addition of Uncle Earl fiddler Rayna Gellert adds another lateral string influence on Perkins’ frightening mastery of bi-hemispheric instrumentation, as does the stirring and off-the-grid contributions of Umar Bin Hassan on the CD’s two long pieces, the 60-year-old Last Poet free associating and slamming down word in fevered rapture, taunting the apocalypse with invocations of Jimi.
“It was kind of a nice welcome home, plus we got to do a few different things and let in some new influences. I mean, that’s important to us. When you do this every day, you’re always finding ways to keep the music as fresh as you can, while still maintaining the core values. There’s also some surf and zydeco in there, Umar’s incredible rapping — man, the guy is incredible, just a complete legend. It was such an honor to collaborate with him. And there’s even some country. I mean, after all is said and done, we’re still North Carolina boys.”
After finishing this run, TK packs the sunscreen for two sets at the December Caribbean Holidaze fest gig in Jamaica, sharing the bill with the Bisco and Umphrey’s, and according to Perkins, perhaps another trip back to Africa in the spring for some study and club gigging, a longtime tradition for the three core members of the band.
“I hope we get to go back, do some playing and studying and catch up with some old friends. It’s good for us, but we didn’t make it last year. We were just too busy.”
We couldn’t help but wonder how the traditional instruments that Perkins carries around with him — the six-stringed kamelengoni and the 21-stringed kora — manage to sustain themselves through all the time zones and resulting climatic insults.
“I bring them everywhere, but these are instruments that were born in Africa… so they like hot weather. They can get a little upset when you’re playing in Southern California on a hot humid day, and the next day it’s snowing in Billings.”
On the Bill
On the Bill
Toubab Krewe performs at 9 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 13, at the Fox Theatre, 1135 13th St., Boulder, 303-443-3399.
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
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The anti-genre
Portugal. The Man defies categories and expectations with their new album
by Alan Sculley
John Baldwin Gourley, songwriter for the band Portugal. The Man, is weary of seeing music and bands being categorized.
“I hate the restraints that the genres are holding right now,” Gourley said in a recent phone interview. “There are so many genres and sub-genres of sub-genres. It’s obnoxious. Why would you want to give yourself a specific label?”
That opinion makes sense for a guy like Gourley. Over the course of three Portugal. The Man albums, he’s already proven that he puts few limits on himself, his producers, his bandmates and other musicians that contribute to the albums.
Censored Colors, the third Portugal. The Man CD, is a good case in point. When singer/guitarist Gourley arrived at the studio with the other band members — Zachary Scott Carothers (bassist/vocals), Jason Sechirst (drums) and Ryan Neighbors (keyboards/vocals) — Gourley barely had any music. He had demoed only a pair of songs and had one more tune that the group had been jamming on in concerts. What’s more, the group had only two and a half weeks to write and record Censored Colors.
Gourley said he was completely comfortable with the set of circumstances, and in fact has never started a record with many of the songs ready to record.
“We’ve always just said here’s our studio time and here we come,” Gourley said. “Let’s just go in and do it and let’s see what comes out. Just with this group, we’ve never really planned too far in advance… We happened to have two and a half weeks off, and I was looking at it like, if we don’t go into the studio now, we won’t be in the studio until (this) summer. That weighed just really, really heavy on me.”
Perhaps it’s just natural for Gourley to do things a bit differently, considering he grew up in a rather unconventional manner. A native of Alaska, Gourley’s father built hotels and moved the family to different locales several times. At one point, the family even lived in a cabin powered by a generator for a year and a half.
Eventually, Gourley met Carothers, and the two formed a group, Anatomy Of A Ghost, which later evolved into Portugal. The Man. The band started out in Alaska, but moved to Portland, Ore., about four years ago.
In the years since, Portugal. The Man has had a couple of band members come and go, and has also featured quite a few guest musicians on album — and on tour.
At the South By Southwest Music Conference this past March, Portugal. The Man had expanded to an eight-musician live lineup. But the band is currently touring with just the four core members. Gourley said he likes how this edition of the band has developed as a live unit.
“It was so nice to see how tight everybody got together, and just backing away from the jamming a little bit has helped the band grow so much,” he said. “I think we may do the headline tour (coming up this fall) as a four piece… We’ve been talking about bringing some people along, just to guest here and there, but it depends on what everybody is up to and how it all lines up.”
Given Gourley’s open-minded approach to creating music, it’s no surprise that Portugal. The Man has been hard to pin down stylistically on its three CDs (as well as three EPs that have been interspersed between the full-length albums).
The first CD, 2006’s Waiter: ‘You Vultures’! had a decidedly electronic element to its sound.
“The first record we did was basically a hip-hop production,” Gourley said. “We just went in, and I really didn’t play guitar a whole lot. I played a bunch of riffs and I pieced together songs, going through we just pieced together drum machine lines, and we just kind of pastiched the whole thing together.”
On 2007’s Church Mouth, Gourley stripped away the drum machines and went for more of an organic and epic psychedelic-accented guitar rock sound that flowed nicely from song to song.
Gourley said Censored Colors, which arrived in stores in mid-September, pulls back on some of the more improvisational elements of Church Mouth, and finds the group crafting more concise, chord-based material. Even though the two-and-a-half-week period created some pressures writing and recording Censored Colors — the first two albums were each done over six-week periods — Gourley couldn’t be more pleased with the results on the new CD.
“This is obviously the most rushed (album) and…” Gourley said, before pausing to reconsider his thought. “It wasn’t necessarily rushed, because I feel like all the songs came out better than anything we’ve done in the past and this is my favorite record by far of ours, like every band will say. I’m sure every band you’ll ever talk to will say the new record is the best. But I feel really good about it, and I think recognizing that fact makes me feel better about it.”
On the Bill:
Portugal. The Man performs at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 14, at the Marquis Theatre, 2009 Larimer St., Denver, 303-292-0805
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
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