The word fusion often conjures up images of well-meaning Westerners poaching and butchering musics from outside their cultural sphere or Jazz artists looking to throw everything into the mix including country pedal steel to look sophisticated and post-ironic. Most of the time that image is dead on. In the case of Shakti and Tabla Beat Science some of that is true but more often than not it is an experiment that works in that both groups manage to successfully blend two different musical traditions and in the case of the latter use those traditions as a bridge to another.
I first stumbled on Shakti’s live album about fourteen years ago as a freshman in college and maybe it was the environment where everything felt new and imbued with a sense of idealism but the album gripped me. With a scant three tracks sprawled over an epic fifty plus minutes it blended trance like percussion with perfumed violin passages and numbingly fast guitar parts. It was exotic and though, at the time had been released seventeen years earlier, it sounded so different as to surpass the stage of novelty and become something all together transformative.
Hyperbole aside, the album remains in my collection and finds itself pulled out at least several times a year which in of itself is a testament to its longevity. What drew me in was how McLaughlin approached the joining of his art with that of Shankar, Raghavan and Vinayakram, and Hussain. Rather than trying to force the music of Southern India into the Western Canon he looks to find ways to incorporate himself with the result being a blissed out journey through frantic and cracked ragas. It is a journey of equals as McLaughlin performs with the ensemble as an equal, trading licks with Shankar and as Hussain, Raghavan, and Vinayakram thunder in the background. By approaching the music in this manner the group has created a work that does not find itself sounding dated, a problem that plagues most fusion music.
Tabla Beat Science is an evolution of Shakti’s work in that the compositions are not designed to force particular instruments into fitting a particular ideal rather it seeks to create another layer to their respective traditions. Live in San Francisco at Stern Grove sees the collective of Bill Laswell, Talvin Singh, Karsh Kale, Trilok Gurtu, Ustad Sultan Khan, and Zakir Hussain, the bridge between the two groups, branch out into a soundscape dominated by Hindustani music, Hip Hop, Drum and Bass, Dub, and Trance.
Laswell’s influence can be distinctly felt as the performance is a thick stew of sound where fragments of traditional structure float about occasionally only to be submerged under waves of rhythms and melodies. Where McLaughlin worked to insert himself into the music Tabla Beat Science appears to be trying to create a new language where the voices of the tabla are comfortable alongside a turntablist and aggressive breakbeats, though much of the groundwork for this was laid by Kale and Singh as individually each has extended dance music further into traditional South Indian music. The results are nothing short of transformative as the group captures the energy of Shatki’s recording some twenty-four years earlier and amplifies it to a joyful apex.
While both Shakti and Tabla Beat Science can be filed under fusion they restore more than a modicum of respect to the genre. If you often find yourself disregarding boundaries or feel most rewarded when you listen to music that takes chances these two albums are must haves that will not disappoint.
When popular mainstream artists such as Bruce, Dixie Chicks, Neil Young or even Charlie Daniels and Toby Keith bring political matters to the stage or God-forbid into their music, it usually creates an uproar amongst their fans. For some strange reason naysayers think that a musical artist’s political opinions should be separate from their art. Regardless, controversy is most likely created because it is unexpected by these artists who for the most part stray away from political material. Michael Franti is no stranger to letting his fans know his opinions, he has been creating music with an underlying political agenda since his first band the Beatnigs in late eighties then in the early nineties with The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy. The roots of protest music can be traced back to blues and folk music from the thirties through the seventies, then punk and reggae from seventies forward. With a sound that some classify as hip-hop, Michael Franti manages to incorporate all of these said genres into his sound.
Poirier is back and this time is slinging beats for himself under his own label, 
