Concert Review: La Banda @ Music Haven (Proctors rain site), 07/13/2023

Towers 300 miles apart stand identical in the Mediterranean sun; one in Seville, Andalusia (southern Spain), the other in Rabat ( Moroccan North Africa); both modeled on a Marrakech mosque.

Musically, those two tips of neighboring continents may be just as closely linked. In a globe- and head-spinning concert Thursday, La Banda Morisca (Spanish for “the Moorish band”) traveled fast on a powerful cultural visa. In a Music Haven concert moved indoors by storms onto the Proctors main stage, they blurred and blended, sampled and celebrated. While riff bits seemed to stem from many of the 22 countries bordering the Mediterranean, the quintet unified it all through sheer skill and dedication to tolerance.

A pre-show talk sketched the challenges this entailed. When Muslim Arabs and Moors invaded Spain and Portugal in 711, North African culture came with them. But the re-conquest and inquisition of 1492 rolled back those influences so comprehensively that instruments and playing techniques were banned while Muslims and Jews were persecuted, exiled or worse. 

La Banda Morisca crusaded against that intolerance, joyfully and with hearts open to modernizing influences from musical territories as distant as jazz and rock. 

But where jazz-rock fusion sometimes shows its seams, La Banda Morsica made music more organic and unified.

From stage right to left, David Ruiz augmented a modern drum kit with North African talking drum and hand percussion, Jeronimo Melgar finger-plucked an electric bass, singer Jose Mari Cala mixed straight, “dry” (European) and ornamented, quavering (North African) vocal styles, Jose Cabral played Moorish oval-bodied guitar and (fretless) North African oud, and Antonio Torres performed a similar mix with both single-reed European saxophones and North African double-reeded (oboe-like) gralla and tarot. (Violinist Belen Lucena is absent this tour.)

OK, enough professorial pondering already.

La Banda Morisca’s dense weave of winds and strings over a simple beat brought movie-made images to mind of camel caravans passing palm glades under brooding sand dunes into welcoming oases.

Stereotypes floated away fast in floods of notes and feeling. Generally, the older their folkloric source tunes – and some dated back centuries – the more North African was what they made from it. (Remember, 711 to 1492?)

The rhythms brought a sense of familiarity or comfort, an anchor of Western logic in Melgar’s bass and Ruiz’s drums and percussion, augmented at times with claps onstage and off. Up top: complexity, either fiery, galloping melodic force or subtle serenity. English intros provided only the sparsest emotional or narrative frameworks of the songs, sung strongly but in untranslated mystery, though Cala’s phrasing often etched feelings clearly.

As in any Music Haven crowd, native speakers in the audience of the language onstage thrilled to familiar words, sounds and meanings.

Many songs protested displacement, cultural destruction through invasion and exile; and many mourned the particular plight of women. “Ol, woven gacela” sketched a girl’s harsh life of toil; based on a 13th century song, it exploded from a very Arabic droning sound into a stop and go groove with a high-vibrato oud solo, a fierce gralla break and a vocal-only interlude before everybody caught back up. “Romance de la amada” – unnecessarily introduced as a sad song – told of a girl sequestered in a convent, slow, sparse guitar framing a big vocal. More broadly, “Gitana Mora” called for tolerance, specifically for Romany and Moorish people, but really for everybody. Extra-strong bass lines underlined this call in only the second-ever performance of this ancient-new song, the emotional centerpiece of the show.

They played flamencos, tangos, rumbas, and, late in their 90-minute set, a fleet, rocking shuffle as Cabral ambled over to stand close to Torres, as in a jam band. Playing was precise where complex rhythms demanded, but also had a jaunty, elastic sense of ease, especially in groove songs. Torres played mostly soprano or alto saxophones in up-tempo runs, gralla or tarota in intros and codas.

Songs grew wings from quiet starts, expanded and contracted, built and faded; “Tres Morillas” piling up contrasting melodic and rhythm episodes in accelerating momentum, for example, until it seemingly couldn’t go further, but did.

They sounded maybe most American at the end, grooving seamlessly into a complex-time beat akin to the Grateful Dead’s “Cryptical Envelopment” before spanning the Atlantic back to Africa and to Spain. This journey featured a propulsive alto foray, spirited percussion eruptions, oud and bass-locking riffs, even some yodeling from Cala.

International, almost interplanetary.

Local hero Maria Zemantauski played acoustic guitar solo to open. She dazzled first in fast-flowing flamenco style, a kinetic hybrid technique of emphatic downward thumb-strokes on the low strings, rapid upward melody plucking, then skittering fast chords by upward splashing fingernails. She also tapped the guitar body percussively at times and mixed things up ala Michael Hedges, an early inspiration.

The flamenco tunes amazed, but her more personal pieces really connected. Cuban composer Leo Brouwer’s “Danza Caracteristica: flowed into her own “Rumba Del Rio,” celebrating the Hudson with its complex currents, while “Chanteuse” honored Hedges in episodic patterns, and “Felucca” celebrated her modern-dance collaborators in Ellen Sinopoli’s troop. “Felucca” launched from stately, arpeggiated passages into a more excited uproar punctuated by percussive tapping.

The 33rd Music Haven season continues on Sunday with the prodigious jazz pianist Joey Alexander; Joe Barna and his Sketches of Influence open the 7 p.m. free show.

Photo Gallery by Rudy Lu