Toubab Krewe

Live at the Orange Peel

(Upstream)

www.toubabkrewe.com

"Jimi JuJu! JuJu, Jimi, JuJu!"

Midway into "Moose," on the second album from Asheville, NC, Mali-delic jammers Toubab Krewe, spoken word guest Umar Bin Hassan, from the legendary Last Poets, launches into an astonishing screed in tribute of Jimi Hendrix. Traipsing the Hendrixian light fantastically while tracing the guitar god's trajectory from the civil rights era onward, Hassan, with a winking wit, gradually builds up a head of steam - Patti Smith ain't got nothin' on this cat - as if he were the late axeman himself in an extended solo, until, sated and spent, he intones these fateful lines:

"Purple haze, in my brain

Losing self, to lose this pain

Embracing the truth

And wanting to fly

‘scuse me, beauty, while I kiss your sky."

As the crowd erupts in delight, the band also erupts in a huge, gawping chordal burst that is also pure Hendrix, subsequently launching into a lithe, loping, cosmic jam that could've come off some heretofore unknown Side 5 of Electric Ladyland. All along they've been painting subtly surrealist hues as a canvas for Hassan's spiky strokes of griot-funk, but here, against a churning backdrop of dub bass and rollicky percussion, guitarists Drew Heller and Justin Perkins peal off lick after echoplexed lick in their own joint tribute to J.H., and one can only listen and imagine that somewhere the gods in the stars (playing with Laughing Sam's dice, natch) are smiling.

If you were there, December 30 and 31, 2007, at Asheville's Orange Peel venue, you were no doubt smiling too - and dancing until your ankles were sore. Toubab Krewe is about the dance, the synching of mind and body until the ecstasy reflex takes over, and this live record finds the quintet at an early career peak. Forming in 2005 and using as a musical jumping-off point the members' woodshedding visits to West Africa (they've studied with Malian locals and even performed at the Festival of the Desert in Mali) alongside an obvious appreciation of reggae, Zydeco and Celtic musics, Toubab Krewe wields the standard rock band's primary colors of guitar-guitar-bass-drums then supplements things with kora and kamale ngoni, courtesy Perkins, plus a player adept in indigenous African percussion such as djembe and scraper. (For the Orange Peel shows, Uncle Earl fiddler Rayna Gellert also guested.) Their first album, 2005's Toubab Krewe, put them on the national radar, and in addition to going over like gangbusters at Bonnaroo and on the jamband circuit, they breathed some rarified NPR air last December when "All Things Considered" singled out Toubab Krewe, Markus James and Afrissippi as at the forefront of an exciting new generational fusion of "homegrown rock music with a West African twist."

A twist indeed. Who needs Paul Simon's whitebread appropriations when artists like Toubab Krewe can kick out the multi-kulcha jams? Live at the Orange Peel starts off with a traditional number adapted by the band, the highlife-flavored "Autorail." Its lighthearted vibe, combined with the insistent tsssst-tsssst percussive tug, is inviting, celebratory - an invocation or overture of spiraling fretwork and flamenco-like kora flourishes. Soon enough, Toubab Krewe is tracing the Mali-to-Mississippi trade routes: "Lamine's Tune"'s bluesy, upbeat groove, rife with cresting/falling dynamics and Zydeco-like rhythms, would feel equally at home at a tribal gathering or a juke-joint throwdown. Another traditional, the kora-powered "Maliba," infuses the highlife with a Caribbean feel spiced with touches of King Sunny Adé.

But it's the Krewe signature tune "Buncombe To Badala" - "Buncombe" refers to their home county - that, along with the Hassan-Hendrix extrapolation, brings down the house. Taking an obvious cue from "Pipeline," the number summons images of surfers hanging ten in Mali (unlikely in the physical world, but perfect for the metaphysical world of music) as the guitarists unleash Dick Dale-worthy twang-tremolo riffs while the rhythm section makes like a mashup of Sly & Robbie, the J.B.'s and Afrika '70. (There's a striking video for the song featuring clips from both the Orange Peel and the band's Festival of the Desert sojourn currently posted at YouTube.)

This, my friends, is where fusion becomes fervor: Toubab Krewe has such a visceral, ear-yanking quality that in the band's capable hands you just might find your definitions of what is/is not rock ‘n' roll and worldbeat being completely rewritten. This is the sound of liberation.

Oh, and lest you think these young players are of the intense, humorless, scholarly bent - Westerners in their zeal to not come off as musical colonialists sometimes wind up walking on eggshells - know this: in West Africa, the word "toubab" means "white person." Might as well tell it like it is, eh?

Standout Tracks: "Buncombe To Badala," "Maliba" FRED MILLS