From West Africa, a Recipe for Spicy Trans-Atlantic Funk
By JON PARELES
Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou, from Benin, belongs on the very short list of the world’s greatest funk bands. More than four decades into its career, most of them spent touring Benin and nearby West African countries, the 10-man orchestra made its blistering North American debut on Sunday night at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. Its founder and one of its main composers, Clément Mélomé, was on saxophone.
Orchestre Poly-Rythmo’s funk has a trans-Atlantic recipe. Take the rhythms that worship the deities of vodun (or voodoo) in their ancestral West African home, Benin. Add the influence of the Agoudas, a group on Benin’s Atlantic coast descended from Brazilian slaves who returned to Africa in the late 1800s. Stir in the Afro-Cuban big-band music that was welcomed in Africa from the 1930s onward, horns and all. Plug in an electric guitar and some biting analog keyboards.
Layer on the crackling, clockwork, wah-wahing mesh of James Brown’s funk, along with its adaptation and re-Africanization into Nigerian Afrobeat. Build the melodies on African modes that may well hark back to those vodun chants. And rev up the tempos.
Even that formulation doesn’t fully account for what Mr. Mélomé and the band’s other songwriters (including its lead singer, Vincent Ahéhéhinnou) have honed since the band was formed in 1968. Orchestre Poly-Rythmo determinedly one-ups its sources. It often folds in an extra cross-rhythm or two; Fifi LePrince’s neatly picked guitar and Moise Loko’s keyboards were constantly scurrying through the music. And the songs don’t settle for prolonging even the most perfectly formed groove. They have multiple well-delineated sections, with voices shoved aside by horns that are then entangled in guitar or sniped at from the keyboard.
Copyright, Blaise APLOGAN, 2010,© Bienvenu sur Babilown
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