Driven by a unified belief in real people playing real instruments
expressing real human emotions, their goal is to create music that is
able to live, breath and develop, with songs that allow the musicians to
communicate and tell a story through carefully crafted melodies and
inspired solo passages. Real world experiences and an inherent knowledge
of jazz set them apart from the crowd. This is a band of working
professional musicians looking to make a name for themselves in the ever
burgeoning Afrobeat scene. Heavily influenced by Afrobeat pioneer Fela
Kuti, but in no way traditional, The group creates grooves reminiscent
of Herbie Hancock, at times reaching the raw, unbridled expression found
in the music of Miles Davis and Freddie Hubbard.
The Brighton Beat stormed onto the scene with their debut; "The
Brighton Beat EP" in 2010, and have since hit the ground running,
performing at premier venues around greater New England. They are
currently touring in support of their first full-length release; "The
Brighton Beat LP" and are preparing to release a live record due out
Fall 2012, recorded during their Summer tour.
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Get Lots of Brighton Beat – It’s All Good
The Brighton Beat are
at Spike Hill in Wiliamsburg tonight, Nov 24. Not only are the band’s
studio recordings both up as free downloads at their Bandcamp page, but
they’ve also got a treasure trove of live recordings at their main site.
Smart move: one taste of this will hook you for life
if the most psychedelic side of Afrobeat or reggae is your thing. The
eleven-piece band’s songs are long, going on for as much as ten minutes
at a clip in the studio and longer onstage.
Their formula is unhurried yet very tightly focused:
introduce the hook and then follow that with slowly unwinding, casually
crescendoing solos. Nobody overplays, and much as everybody in the band
takes his time getting where he’s going, the point is that they all get
there: this stuff doesn’t sound anything like Phish. For that matter,
it doesn’t sound much like anybody else either. Washington’s Elikeh come to mind, but The Brighton Beat are much more of a jamband, and on the occasion that they go deep into dub, they’re very good at it.
The
latest studio album opens with a trickily rhythmic, hypnotically
Ethio-flavored number with elements of vintage ska. Zach Kamins’ echoey
Rhodes piano solo switches to organ and then back, Mark Cocheo’s guitar
goes growling and then hands off elegantly to Mark Zaleski’s alto sax.
The second track, Changing Elevators is more of a straight-up Afrobeat
number that vamps and meanders and then suddenly comes together out of a
long Jon Bean tenor sax solo with a snarling minor-key phrase. Then the
guitar does the same thing. As with several of the songs here, they
band gracefully fades it down.
By
contrast, Giraffe is a balmy, loping tune driven by Ryan Hinchey’s
catchy bassline, raging alto sax contasting with the organ as Kamins
wiggles the tremolo. Capture the Flag builds with solos from baritone
sax and guitar ove a lush Isaac Hayes-style soul/funk vamp, while the
darkest track on this album, The Paradox, pairs off uneasy chromatics
from the keys and guitar against the horns’ fiery Ethiopiques. The album
ends with twelve minutes of Indian Summer, a hypnotic, trippy dub
anchored by very cleverly shifting bass beneath layers and layers of
swirly atmospherics, ominous guitar and sax lines.
Be
aware that some of the live shows are big files (the Ryles Jazz Club
gig from this past August is practically 400 mb); you’ll want to make
sure your wifi is screaming and you’ve got enough space on that flash
drive.