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Concert Review
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2010.09.25: Debo Band w/ Fendika / Magic Carpet @ Martyr's The Chicago World Music Festival almost passed me by this year without me even noticing, but I managed to run out and catch this night of Ethio-groove-jazz. I've loved this stuff ever since I heard it in the film 'Broken Flowers', and these bands are pretty Mulatu Astatke worshipers, which is just fine by me.
Ok, I guess Magic Carpet is a bit more broad based, swinging from West African afrobeat, over east to India, and everything in between. But it's all in the same field of hypno-groove-jazz. They were good openers, but the headline performance made me nearly lose all memory of them.
Debo Band is 11 Mulatu-worshipers from Boston, while Fendika is a singing/dancing quartet actually from Ethiopia. Apparently Debo Band has actually spent some time performing in Ethiopia, and so hooked up with these natives, and brought 'em back to perform with them for a few shows around the US.
With Debo Band, you get a 4-piece brass section, 2 violins, accordion, bass, guitar, drums, and a male vocalist. All the instruments are there for a reason, and it was always possible to pick out each instrument from the dense layers of harmonies, which is quite unusual for a band of that size, and makes for an incredibly detailed sound. There was no Janick Gers going on here!
They would have been very good on their own, but adding in the goat-skin percussionist, soulful female singer, and shiningly charismatic dancers from Fendika, and it was truly something exceptional. Fifteen people grooving onstage, and the crowd following right along (though not shakin' it quite to the extreme level of the Fendika dancers!) At any world-music type show in Chicago, it seems there is always a group of 5 or 10 people that turn up who have recently emigrated from the country that inspired the music being played, and they tend to lead the excitement and dancing, slowly bringing us staid NPR music nerds along with them. And this show was no exception. They played for over two hours, closing with "Musicawi Silt", better known to me as "Safina", the awesome closing song of Secret Chiefs 3's 'Book M', and it was incredible. The SC3 version is huge, but this managed to be even bigger. 10/02/10
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