Shaolin Rising

The Budos Band – Budos Rising
The Budos Band – Ride or Die
(from The Budos Band II)

Mulatu Astatqe – Yekermo Sew
(from Ethiopiques, Vol. 4: Ethio Jazz & Musique Instrumentale, 1969-1974)

When the music of the Budos Band comes through your stereo it’s as if you’re being transported to a dimly lit bar, wearing dark shades, a lavender pin-stripe suit, and skinny black tie. The brass moans and bays, the organ flashes and dips around a subterranean, coal-burning groove. It sounds untouchable, noir, and worldly. It sounds, well, cool.

But for all the exotic reference points for this music, straddling a line between west African instrumental funk and northeast African jazz with a punch of Memphis soul, the Budos hail from Staten Island, the dumping grounds of New York. And, in its own way, this humbling admission is reassuring. After all, if a group of 11, racially-mixed Staten Islanders who met at an after-school community jazz program can find a way to express their deep and devoted respect of the various strains of Afro-soul, why can’t I, a white kid from middle America, do the same?

Looking back, it seems odd to think that there must have been a distinct moment in my suburban upbringing where, for instance, the Afro-beat polyrhythms of a Nigerian political prisoner could become a subject of extraordinary interest to me. To think that my unhealthy musical obsessions could grow so desperately far-reaching that I could listen to a track like “Ride or Die” and be instantly struck by its similarity to the Ethiopian jazz arranger Mulatu Astatqe’s “Yekermo Sew” (which the film geeks among you will identify from its prominent use in Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers)? And it’s true, both songs share a languid, descending pentatonic melody complimented with enough outlandish flourishes to make Addis Ababa sound like the home of Ali Baba, but isn’t there something more useful I could be doing with my time, like learning the basics of home plumbing?

If I was a mean-spirited rockist, I could argue, with some justification, that the music of the Budos Band simply isn’t as strong as the music from which they so obviously derive their influence: the funk isn’t as funky, the jazz isn’t as jazzy, and the soul just isn’t as soulful. But taking that approach would be missing the point – it’s where these influences intersect that marks the beginning of the Budos style, and it’s how the band takes these styles and coaxes and contorts them in unexpected directions that makes their music interesting. While their origins come from rhythm-centric genres, the Budos Band use the harmonic interplay of their instruments and the overcompressed analog textures of the recording to fill any room with a smokey, rye-soaked aroma.

Of course, mixing these styles is nothing new. James Brown, Sly Stone, Fela Kuti, and Miles Davis all became legends in their own right by borrowing elements from these different styles and from each other, and incorporating the bits and pieces in completely innovative and compelling ways. The Budos Band are dipping into those same creative wells, or, more appropriately for Staten Island, digging through those same old, scavenged garbage piles, and coming up with something remarkably fresh. It must be that Shaolin magic.

-Posted by Todd