Manhattan’s Best Venue Stages a Thunderous Benefit for Their Brooklyn Counterpart

The Barbes benefit concert at Drom Friday night wasn’t sold out, but the East Village venue was close to capacity. Big Lazy headlined. By then the dancers had been on their feet for the better part of four hours, yet didn’t seem the least bit worn out. So the shadowy, cinematic trio of guitarist Steve Ulrich, bassist Andrew Hall and drummer Yuval Lion played their slinkiest stuff. Ulrich shifted eerily between desolate big-sky tableaux, furtively chromatic crime jazz, a wryly strutting go-go theme or two and red-neon roadhouse scenes while Hall spun his bass, supplying a tight rubber-band low end in tandem with Lion’s thicket of textures from every part of his kit. Gato Loco trombonist Tim Vaughn and Balkan Beat Box baritone sax player Peter Hess added extra careening, elusive textures at the end of their tantalizingly brief set, whose centerpiece was the title track from the band’s latest album Don’t Cross Myrtle, a muted bump-in-the-night theme that turned completely savage in seconds flat.

Ulrich dedicated the song to Barbes, the band’s embattled Park Slope home base, which serves the same purpose for many other artists, the rest of the night’s bill included. Considering the song’s title and its creepy themes (it’s an instrumental), on face value it seems to address deep Brooklyn nocturnal peril. But this time out, introducing the song, Ulrich alluded to a “changing Brooklyn,” and suddenly another meaning, 180 degrees the opposite, emerged: keep your wrecking balls and other weapons of mass destruction, your money-laundering, your swindler speculators and “luxury” condos, and the status-grubbing yuppies who move into them, out of our part of town. It may be sketchy, but it’s all we have left. There isn’t anyplace else in New York in 2017 where a working class person or an artist can survive.

The brain drain out of New York and the mass displacement of artists to the most remote fringes of the five boroughs aren’t the only reasons that Barbes is in trouble. Their building has been hit with a lien for city services, no fault of the venue; in the meantime, their Indiegogo campaign is almost eighty percent funded. “I can’t believe this place still exists,” marveled one patron under her breath at the bar Saturday night while Sean Cronin’s oldschool honkytonk band played in the back room. If there’s any Brooklyn venue that deserves support or patronage right now, it’s this one.

And they have a lot of overlap with Drom, their more spacious but similarly friendly Manhattan counterpart, where acts from around the world continue to make their North American debuts, month after month. It’s not clear whether MaracatuNY, who opened the benefit, had played there before; whatever the case, it’s probably safe to say that they’re the loudest band ever to play there. And they did it without amplification. Gathered in a semicircle on the floor in front of the stage, the roughly fifteen-piece drum troupe built a thunderous torrent of intricate Brazilian polyrhythms, turning on a dime as their conductor signaled changes with his whistle and hand signals in the eye of the storm. They’d return later on.

The Jazz Passengers were just as intricate and even more entrancing. Frontman Roy Nathanson played alto sax, soprano sax and on We’re All Jews, their most epic number, both at once, working his polytonal sorcery for extra overtones. Bass player Bradley Jones teamed with the drums for a serpentine groove and lowdown funk as vibraphone star Bill Ware took a rare turn on electric piano. Their first number was the most vividly murky exploration of the noir they’ve become known for; after that, Nathanson harmonized wryly with trombonist Curtis Fowlkes on a smoky take of the 70s soul standard Everybody Plays the Fool.

Romany chanteuse Sanda Weigl – who has a new album due out from Barbes Records this fall – went deep into her powerful alto for a couple of a-cappella Romanian songs. Then a three-piece version of the all-female Mariachi Flor de Toloache, New York’s only all-female mariachi band, joined their soaring voices for a harmony-fueled, all-too-brief set that began like a Mexican-flavored Dixie Chicks and then went deeper into the tricky tempos and clapalong vigor of classic south-of-the-border string band sounds, with intertwining violin, cuatro and bajo sexto.

The next two bands each put their own rustic, exhilarating spin on ancient African call-and-response chants. Charismatic singer Carolina Oliveros’ Bulla En El Barrio led her ten-piece choir-and-percussion ensemble through a mesmerizingly kaleidoscopic series of Colombian bullerengue, which sounded like a South American take on African-American field hollers, the guys and women in the band taking turns spiraling and cavorting in front of the upraised voices.

Then Innov Gnawa – who brought the biggest crowd of the night – got the crowd bouncing with their trance-inducing forest of click-clack cast-iron castanets and sintir bass lute, first played by Samir LanGus and then bandleader, Moroccan expat maalem Hassan Ben Jaafer. Their first number kicked off a rousing Arabic welcome-to-the-party jam, with sub-Saharan rhythms from what could be two thousand years ago welded to undulating North African acoustic funk, infused with bracing, sometimes moody allusions to both Arabic music and the roots of the blues.

To keep the dancers on their feet, the massive Fanfare Brooklyn – a mighty twenty-plus piece Balkan brass band comprising most of Slavic Soul Party and Red Baraat – blazed through careening jams packed with some pretty unhinged soloing, drawing from both band’s catalogs of hip-hop-inspired Eastern European brass music and Indian bhangra.

All of these bands play all over town when they’re not at Barbes. Mariachi Flor de Toloache are playing an album release weekend for their new one, with shows on June 16 at 10 and the following night, June 17 at midnight at Joe’s Pub; cover is $25. Bulla En El Barrio are back at Barbes on June 26 at around 9:30. Innov Gnawa’s next big show is at Prospect Park Bandshell at 7:30 PM on July 21, where they open for intense, psychedelic Malian microtonal guitar band Amadou and Mariam. And Big Lazy return to their monthly Friday night residency at Barbes on July 7 at 10 PM.

Talavya Treats the Throngs to Torrential Tabla Thrills

Thursday night at Lincoln Center, Talavya’s harmonium player Heena Patel scrunched up her face. Facing the crowd, she explained her dilemma.”I tell people that this band plays tabla. They say, ‘No vocals. no melody.’” She shrugged.

And then let those thoughts resonate. “What do YOU think of tabla?” she wanted to know.

The crowd exploded. Sure, there was a good representation of New Yorkers with heritage in the Hindustani subcontinent, but there were more who probably had none. This demographically diverse, typical New York audience had just witnessed a suspenseful, electrifying three-way drum duel between tabla players Rushi Vakil, Kaumil Shah and Mike Lukshis.

On one hand, it was a breathtaking display of supersonic chops. On the other, the first segment of composer Divyang Vakil’s suite Tabla Dreams was just as much of a showcase for subtlety as well as the group’s encyclopedic rollout of Indian beats from across the centuries.

Those chops were matched by a sense of humor. It might be extreme to equate this performance to having three Zakir Hussains onstage, but the effect was pretty close. Each player’s personality immediately made itself known. Rushi Vakil made it look easy and more often than not served as the ringleader, completely deadpan, unless he was winding up a frenetic volley with a final slap and then flinging his hand away, daring his bandmates to match his finesse and power. Shah has an attack with ferocity to match his articulation: imagine a machinegunner who can also hit a target at a thousand yards. The New Jersey-born Lukshis, front and center, rose to the challenge of playing on the level of his Indian-born bandmates, who probably grew up with a tabla in front of them before they could walk. His right hand a blur, his beats spun and somersaulted and sometimes galloped in an endlessly adrenalizing series of tradeoffs along with the occasional stampeding unison passage.

The tabla is the rare drum which can also play melody, and the group delivered plenty of those. The most breathtaking was a recurrent low-register sirening effect. The funniest was when they’d play a series of riffs and then perfectly replicate them by vocalizing in rapidfire takadimi drum language – a playful Indian mnemonic device where every beat from various places on the tabla, from muted, to sharp, to low and warpy, has an equivalent syllable. Meanwhile Patel anchored the music with an endlessly circling series of enigmatic, often ominous modal riffs, serving as co-conductor and signaling changes when the three guys would go off on a rampage.

The suite’s first part was mostly tradeoffs; the second featured the more intricate and delicate beats a tabla player can deliver. The third was a clinic in gats, encompassing both rhythmic riffs and shifting time signatures, rising and falling and finally winding up in a blaze that left both band and audience out of breath. Patel averred that this was the band’s first US performance in a year – hopefully we won’t have to wait another until the next one.

These Lincoln Center atrium performances are amazing. The next one in the ongoing series of performers from around the world is this Thursday, May 25 at 7:30 PM with one of the world’s greatest and most eclectic oud players and composers, Rahim Al Haj. Admission is free; get there early if you want a seat.

Shujaat Khan Envelops the Audience in Starry, Nocturnal Rapture at the Miller Theatre

Sitar virtuoso Shujaat Khan is as funny as his music is deep. His work is characterized by vastness, poignancy, and both subtle and explosive dynamics, but is also spiced with great wit. Friday night at the Miller Theatre, his seemingly sold-out show – booked by the World Music Institute in collaboration with Columbia University’s South Asia Institute – was rich with sparring and musical banter. He tantalized the audience with a fleeting series of gorgeously plaintive riffs early on, then engaged them more broadly with peek-a-boo syncopation. His sparring with father-and-son tabla players Samir and Dibyarka Chatterjee was as much a philosophical dialogue as it was it was a joust between old friends, throughout a rapturous two-hour performance of the nocturne Raga Jhinjhoti.

Khan addressed the crowd candidly before the show, explaining that he had just discovered that an audience Q&A had been planned for midway through the performance. “Does anybody have any questions?” he grinned. Quoting a joke by an old buddy, Khan demurred that “Musicians and paintings are a lot alike: they should be kept at a distance. You didn’t come here to hear me talk, did you?”  Saluting this New York audience for their passion and support for Indian classical music, he then took his time slowly unfolding the raga with a meticulousness and unselfconscious wonder for the simple resonance of a series of minimalistic phrases – like Morton Feldman without the fussiness.

The opening alap (solo improvisation) took Khan at least a half an hour. A couple of times, he threw a glance at the tablas, but the Chatterjees weren’t about to join the conversation yet: Khan was on a roll and they wanted to witness that as much as the crowd did. Slowly and matter-of-factly, he worked both sides of a dialogue, throwing in the occasional, strikingly energetic short phrase, as well as a few luridly shivery downward glissandos that became the night’s most adrenalizing recurrent tropes.

The tablas entered, first the father, then the son, then together. Khan scouted the perimeter and eventually settled on an enigmatically energetic, hypnotically circling midrange phrase that he used to anchor the percussionists’ cascading beats. The bandleader recalled having played New York with his own dad, the great Vilayat Khan, forty years ago, likening what the younger Chatterjee had to deal with as being “a deer in the headlights.”

From there, the trio were all about suspense and setting a mood. Just when the volume and intensity hinted that they might finally leave the ground, Khan would pull back. The trio peppered the starry warmth with irresistibly fun echo phrases, almost-pregnant pauses and then finally a brief interlude of low-key vocalese from the bandleader. After finally throwing caution to the wind, building a long crescendo that eventually hit doublespeed,and even more, Khan wound down the performance with a thoughtful, counterintuitive return to the conversation that brought the piece full circle.

The next show on the World Music Institute calendar is by another Indian group, trippy tabla/harmonium ensemble Talavya at the atrium at Lincoln Center this Thursday, May 18. The  concert is free, but you should plan on getting the space on Broadway at 63rd St. at least an hour before the 7:30 PM start time if you want to get in – and earlier, if you want a seat.

Vast, Inviting, Hypnotic Indian Raga Soundscapes and a Brooklyn Show by Arranged Marriage NP

Arranged Marriage NP play a distinctive, hypnotic, psychedelic mashup of classical Indian raga music and Eno-esque soundscapes with flickers of industrial noise and Frippertronics-style textures. Guitarist/keyboardist Jerry Adler got his start as the singer in indie rockers the Blam, released a couple of fiery lyrical acoustic folk-rock albums as Flugente and then turned to dreampop with Wave Sleep Wave. Here, he teams with Indian classical duo the Biryani Boys’ sitarist Mustafa Bhagat for a quartet of long instrumentals. The duo’s debut album is streaming at Bandcamp; they’re playing the album release show at 8:30 PM on May 10 at Art Cafe, 884 Pacific St.(at Washington Ave) in Fort Greene as part of Brooklyn Raga Massive’s weekly series there. Cover is $15; the closest train is the 2 to Bergen St.,

Over just under eleven minutes, Bhagat’s sitar on the opening number, Hemant gives Adler a terse, spacious backdrop to play against. With a wash of synth in the background, the guitarist’s deep-space resonance moves to the center, then backs away for a similarly celestial sitar solo. Then Adler brings some trippy backward masking as well as a gritty industrial crunch into what’s an otherwise starry, peaceful picture.

The similarly expansive Bhimpalasi juxtaposes a plaintive alap (improvisation) from the sitar over droll bubbles and industrial textures from Adler: a rugged individualist against a stubborn, antagonistic universe, maybe? The third track, Hamsadhwani builds almost imperceptibly from a warmly expansive, inviting sitar intro that Adler slowly paints a quasar galaxy over with his echoey guitar and terse yet vast washes of keys, a simple, emphatic four-note riff repeating for maximum hypnotic effect.

The final track, Malkauns, is also the album’s shortest, clocking in at just over nine minutes worth of the album’s most uneasy themes. Adler chooses his spots, playing with a slide or adding enigmatically clanging phrases; as the echo grows, it becomes harder and harder to tell who in the duo is playing what, testament to the kind of chemistry they conjure. Toward the end, Adler snarls and crunches into aggressive Marc Ribot skronk, a logical conclusion that delivers a big payoff considering that it took almost forty minutes of womb-like comfort to get there.

Rapt Atmospherics from Arooj Aftab and a Tantalizing Vijay Iyer Cameo at Merkin Hall

What’s karmic payback for walking out of a Vijay Iyer show? Losing a recording of the most awestruck, rivetingly beautiful concert of the year, for starters – that, and missing out on most of a performance by this era’s most distinctive and arguably most influential pianist. Vijay, if you’re reading this, don’t take it personally. This blog’s proprietor once walked out on Pauline Oliveros too.

Not that she wasn’t great. It’s just that sometimes the demands of running a blog don’t always coincide with having a life. Saturday night at Merkin Concert Hall, it was at least good to get to see a rapturous, often mesmerizing performance by Pakistani singer and composer Arooj Aftab leading a quartet including pianist Leo Genovese, drummer Jorn Bielfeldt and synth player Yusuke Yamamoto through what seemed to be a largely improvisational suite.

Singing mostly vocalese in a cool, hushed, nuanced mezzo-soprano, Aftab ran her vocals through a series of effects for additional subtlety, adding reverb or looping her phrasing, mostly for the sake of rhythmic shifts. Genovese played the show of his life. Since Aftab’s ghazal-inspired tone poems don’t often shift key and typically eschew western harmony, the pianist assembled an eerily glittering architecture out of passing tones, first bringing to mind Bill Mays playing Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks themes, then raising the ante to white-knuckle terror in places. Although there was one interlude where Genovese took a long, energetic solo, he held back from going against the current and trying to make postbop out of Aftab’s pensive atmospherics…or taking the easy route and hanging back with open fifths and octaves.

Bielfeldt also played with remarkable and intuitive restraint. Toward the end, he and Genovese exchanged coyly conversational riffs as the music swelled, but otherwise he was all about the lustre. Under these circumstances, having a synth in the band usually spells disaster, but Yamamoto turned out to be a magic ingredient with his deep-space washes of chords and the occasional elegant synth bass riff.

After a roughly forty-minute set, Aftab brought out Iyer for a duo as the encore. It seemed at this point that for a pianist, following Genovese would be just plain cruel, considering how he’d just mined every macabre tonality in the keys and the overtone system. But Iyer went in a more optimistic direction, opting for an approach that was both more hypnotically rhythmic and minimalist, while airing out similar resonance from the overtones. Watching him think on his feet with a much more limited choice of options than usual was rewarding; sticking around for his own set would no doubt have been twice as fun. Iyer is currently on tour; he’ll be back in New York on May 9 leading a sextet through a week at the Vanguard.

Wild Brass-Fueled Indian Bhangra Band Red Baraat Release Their Most Dynamic, Epic Album

Red Baraat are New York’s best-loved and probably loudest party band. They play original brass-fueled Indian bhangra music, taking an exuberantly explosive sound to new levels of eclecticism and sheer volume. Intense, hypnotic Indian modes follow tidal waves of dynamics up and down, the band’s signature, blazing brass section anchored by the intricately stampeding beats of their three drummers. If you can’t dance to this stuff, you can’t dance to anything.

They’re bringing the party to two release shows for their most diverse and arguably best album, the brand-new Bhangra Pirates, available on vinyl and streaming at Spotify. On March 9 at they’re at the comfortable auditorium at Bric Arts in downtown Brooklyn for $15 in advance. Then on March 18 they’re at the Poisson Rouge at 10:30 PM for five bucks more. That’s the advance ticket price for standing room, it’ll set you back more if you just show up at the door or if you want a seat. Although going to see Red Baraat and not being on your feet would be pretty bizarre…

The album’s opening track, Horizon Line is a blazing mashup of new wave and bhangra, with a little New Orleans spice; John Altieri’s sousaphone plays the big hook as a bassline. Jonathan Goldberger’s ominous Middle Eastern taqsim kicks off Zindabad, a slinky, epic fanfare of sorts, the high brass – Jonathon Haffner’s soprano sax and Sonny Singh’s trumpet – against the formidable lows from Altieri and trombonist Ernest Stuart, with a wildly sailing Haffner solo midway through. Likewise, on the title track, Golderger’s guitar matches the mighty majesty of the horns; it’s an Indian take on the kind of hip-hop brass mashup that the group’s Barbes colleagues Slavic Soul Party were pioneering ten years ago.

Underneath Haffner’s soaring sax, bandleader/dhol drummer Sunny Jain teams up with twin drummers Chris Eddleton and Rohin Khemani for a scrambling and then titanically swaying groove throughout white-knuckle intense modalities of Tunak Tunak Tun. The brooding exchange of instrumental voices as Rang Barse gets underway only hint at the vast, cinematic panorama the band will build to as they reach escape velocity, stirring in elements of both peak 70s-era Burning Spear roots reggae as well as Serbian brass music.

Bhangale follows a similarly moody tangent upward, but with more punchy rhythm and melody; Goldberger leads the charge with a bluesmetal-tinged attack. With its hip hop-inspired chorus, swaying spirals of beats, biting chromatics and searing, noisy Goldberger solo, Gaadi of Truth has the feel of a big audience-participation number. Then with Se Hace Camino, the band takes a catchy minor-key salsa tune and sets it to a bhangra beat.

Imagine the Hawaii 5-0 theme set to a deliriously clattering but steady groove and you have part of Akhiyan Udeek Diyan; it gets warmer and sunnier as it goes along, with a serpentine trombone solo where Stuart hands off to Haffner, who leads everybody to a wild crescendo at the end . The album’s final cut, Layers is as surprisingly lighthearted as it is wickedly catchy. It’s amazing how many flavors the band have added to their arsenal over the years; count this as an instant contender for best release of 2017. 

Raptly Tuneful Middle Eastern-Flavored Pastorales From Surface to Air

It would have been fun to see Surface to Air at Barbes last night. The trio – guitarist Jonathan Goldberger, who rarely plays acoustic, alongside bassist Jonti Siman and tabla player Rohin Khemani – also doesn’t play out much either. Their sparse, warmly tuneful, hypnotically intriguing album is available as a name-your-price download from Bandcamp.

The opening track is aptly titled Simple: built on an elegantly catchy rainy-day minor-key theme played with meticulous touch by Goldberger, it centers around a kinetic tabla rhythm. Heysatan is even more spare, Goldberger’s gentle, purposeful, catchy tune again centered around the rhythm section’s steady anchor. Siman’s similarly easygoing bass intro is a clever fake: as the briskly saturnine, Palestinian-tinged theme unwinds, it sounds like an acoustic sketch for a David Lynch soundtrack set in the most war-torn territory in Gaza. Siman’s drone anchors a suspenseful interlude that Goldberger spins and spirals out of with hints of Django Reinhardt.

The slow, somber Odalisque is sort of a bolero counterpart to a Trio Joubran-style Middle Eastern dirge. Matanzas is Goldberger’s platform for using a catchy, melancholy flamenco-inflected theme to set up a swoopy, morose bass solo. With its steady sway, Arcana follows a steadily crescendoing folk noir tangent that brightens as it goes along.

The Sleep in Your Eyes opens with a dusky, sepulchral improvisation, builds to a spare, galloping pulse and then recedes back to spacious, pensive solo guitar. The final track is the ballad Waltz for Celia, the closest thing to postbop here, spiced with the occasional levantine or south Asian riff over rather ominous low-end percussion, with a gracefully uneasy bass solo.

Is this Middle Eastern music? Sure. Indian music? Rhythmically, yes. Jazz? Why not? Download this delicious disc and decide for yourself. Thanks to Barbes for booking this fantastic band, who otherwise would have flown under the radar here. Goldberger is in constant demand in New York as a sideman and plays with a ton of groups, notably violinist Dana Lyn’s psychedelic, ecologically themed Mother Octopus outfit.

Three Indian-Influenced Bands Play the Year’s Best Triplebill So Far in the East Village

What’s the likelihood of seeing three of the most fascinating, individualistic, often spine-tingling bands in town, all on the same bill – fronted by three similarly distinctive, brilliant singers, no less? And at a good venue with terrific sound – Drom, in the East Village – rather than at some scuzzy Bushwick bar that nobody outside the neighborhood can get to since the trains aren’t running on the weekend?

It happened five days ago on a triplebill put together by fiery, dramatic art-rock violinist/singer Rini and her band, who played in between swoony psychedelic soul singer/bandleader Shilpa Ananth and titanic spacerock band Humeysha. Although the three acts were stylistically very different, the common link – beyond sheer fun and breathtaking musical chops – was that each draws on classical Indian melodies for inspiration.

Although the club wasn’t packed, there was a good turnout considering that the show coincided with the flashmobs out at Kennedy Airport protesting Trump’s racist anti-Muslim edict. Ananth was the subtlest act on the bill. Her songs shifted shape, sometimes gently, sometimes dramatically as her voice rose, singing in English, Hindi and Tamil. Her opening neosoul anthem had an early 80s trip-hop pulse that got funkier as it hit a peak, driven by Khairul Aiman’s purposeful bass and Kazuhiro Odagiri’s drums. Multi-keyboardist Takahiro Izumikawa shifted artfully between echoey, surrealisitcally nocturnal electric piano, swirly organ and some wryly warped P-Funk tone-bending when the ambience got totally psychedelic.Ananth swayed, eyes closed, lost in the music most of the time. Guitatist Luis D’Elias got to fire off the most electrifying solos of the set: long, menacing, reverb-iced cumbia and Middle Eastern-tinged passages, and later a blisteirng blast of bluesmetal. Tabla player Sai Raman added texture and kept the suspenseful groove going when the songs got quiet; trumpeter Bobby Spellman added crystalline Miles Davis-influenced lines, sometimes harmonizing with alto sax player Syl DuBenion.

Ananth brought to mind Anita O’Day at her most playful and plush, then went into starry, unselfconsciously tender mode with her melismatics over an emphatic, trip hop-ish beat. As the music swayed behind her, she went off-script midway through the night’s most enigmatically aching ballad to explain that in Hindi, just as in English, finding a home means finding a space, and that the time is now for us to defend ours,  a message that resounded with the audience. Ananth’s next show is Feb 23 at 7 PM, an acoustic set with tabla and piano at Kava Shteeble, 94 Ralph Ave in Bushwick; take the J to Gates Ave..

Rini a.k.a Harini S Raghavan delivered the night’s most intense performance. The Chennai, India-born frontwoman leads what has to be the most multicultural band in town. Guitarist Aleif Hamdan is from Jakarta; bassist Achal Murthy hails from Luxembourg. Drummer Tancredi Lo Cigno is Italian and sax/electronic wind instrument player Íñigo Galdeano Lasheras is Spanish. Whatever language they speak, it all adds up to fire. Their jaunty opening number faked everybody out: from there, the band dug in and the storm began.

With her powerful, often ferocious mazzo-soprano and dancing, carnatically-influenced violin lines, Raghavan led the group through a dynamic set that blended Trans-Siberian Orchestra pomp with distantly macabre early ELO and even more towering cinematics. Somewhere there is a video game franchise or a postapocalyptic film screaming out for this woman to write its soundtrack.

Staying in sync with an electronic track – in this case, mostly loops of piano and ambience – is difficult, but the band stayed on track as Raghavan’s voice dipped and lept and bent as the music careened and slunk along, through a swaying heroic overture, a catchy bhangra riff transposed to trip-hop, knifes-edge Middle Eastern themes, a detour into menacing, wah-driven Doctors of Madness-style psychedelia and finally a galloping mini-raga. What a blissfully adrenalizing set. Rini are scheduled to rip the roof off Silvana on Feb 17 at 9.

Humeysha were the most epic band of the night – and distinguished themselves with the shortest songs of any epic band anywhere in the world. They always leave you wanting more. Frontman/guitarist Zain Alam sang in a strong, expressive chorister’s baritone and played through a vast wash of digital delay and reverb, matched by lead guitarist Adrien Defontaine. Alam’s brother Shayan went high up the fretboard of his bass, Peter Hook style as drummer John Snyder anchored the spacious sonics, at one point taking an unexpected and deliciously artful shift where he played the most of the song on the offbeat against the rest of the group.

Their only really lighthearted number brought to mind the Smiths in a sardonic moment; many of the other songs could have fit easily on a Church album from the early 90s. Defontaine hung out around the 18th fret for most of the set, firing off meteor showers of notes and taking the occasional lightning-bolt run down the scale. Where the night’s first two acts were all over the place stylistically, these guys set a mood and launched it as far and as deep as they could take it, reinventing a bunch of centuries-old carnatic riffs in the meantime. At the end of the night, the crowd screamed for an encore; the frontman explained that with his brother being new in the band, they didn’t have any more material worked up. They’re at Brooklyn Bazaar on Feb 15 at around 9ish.

Four First-Class Female-Fronted Global Acts at Drom Last Night

Early into her second raga yesterday evening at Drom, Roopa Panesar took an impulsive slide up the neck of her sitar. Then another, then another, against the rumbling, rippling beat of both a tabla and a mridangam. That twin-percussion drive is unusual in Indian classical music, but it suited Panesar well. For somebody whose right hand was a blur much of the time, she plays with an economy of notes, letting the river of beats carry most of the weight while she ran through a deep catalog of centuries-old riffs and thoughtfully placed variations. None of the material in her tantalizingly brief set went on for much longer than about eight minutes, slowly crescendoing alaps (improvisational intros) included. Meanwhile, the mridangam anchored the music with a fat low end, sometimes in tandem with the tabla, at other times giving the tabla room to sail overhead with an extra layer of polyrhythms. Panesar could have gone on for three times as long as she did and the audience wouldn’t have complained.

Punjabi songwriter and ghazal reinventor Kiran Ahluwalia was next, fronting a fantastic band which included both her brilliant guitarist husband Rez Abbasi and accordionist Will Holshouser along with a rock rhythm section. Abbasi only took one detour into the raga jazz that he’s been exploring so memorably lately, but he really those adrenalizing upward flurries count. Holshouser and the bassist added more than a hint of roots reggae on one of the later numbers while the bandleader brought an especially vigorous edge to her lustrously entrancing songs. The most anthemic was Jane Na, which contemplates how to exorcise personal demons, she explained. The group closed with their bounciest number, a cover that gave Ahluwalia a chance to air out her nuanced but potently expressive upper register.

Quebecoise fiddler Briga and her band have lately shifted from the Balkan music that she first made a name for herself in, to embrace North African grooves and melodies. It’s a good fit all around. There were echoes of moody chaabi balladry, funky Nubian beats and plenty of enigmatic, Egyptian-tinged tunefulness in her kinetically pulsing mix of instrumentals and vocal numbers. Singing first in French in a cool, unaffected alto, she led her excellent band through a set which, like Panesar’s, could have gone on for much longer – but this weekend is the booking agents’ convention, necessitating a constant changeover between acts. Briga’s keyboardist shifted artfully from spacy P-Funk synth, to slithery accordion, to reverbtoned, Herbie Hancock-tinged electric piano psychedelia while her subtle, propulsive bassist and two percussionists wove an intricately boomy lattice of lows.

Eclectic cellist/banjo player Leyla McCalla enjoyed a warm homecoming set, joined by her husband Daniel Tremblay on five-string banjo and electric guitar, in addition to an inspired violinist playing under the name Free-For-All. McCalla’s biggest audience hit was a spare, bluesy, aphoristically minor-key number that she dedicated to “the President-Elect,” whose meaning essentially boiled down to “if you don’t have money, you’re no more than a dog.” That was the night’s most political moment. Otherwise, she switched between instruments, singing in a cool, clear voice in English, Cajun and Kreyol, reflecting her Haitian-American heritage. The spare, Caribbean folk-tinged Time For the Hunter, Time For the Prey, an early number, addressed the perils of Haitian immigration. There was also a lilting Haitian love song, a bouncy Acadian-flavored number along with distant references to zydeco and some deep blues. Hearing her play those spare, plaintively antique phrases way down low on her cello made for some of the night’s most texturally delicious moments, matched by her down-to-earth vocals.

This being booking agent weekend, there were other acts on the bill. The last time this blog was in the house at a Banda Magda show, it was the summer of 2015 on the Hudson River way up on the Upper West, rugrats were running all over the place and frontwoman Magda Giannikou entertained them with a mix of jaunty retro 60s-style French pop, Mediterranean ballads and some hauntingly shapeshifting, Middle Eastern-flavored material. And southwestern gothic avatars Orkesta Mendoza, who were scheduled to headline (after doing the same at a late show at the Mercury, no less), haunted and pulsed their way through a mighty set of noir mambos and bolero rock. That was a couple of weeks after the Banda Magda show and was a lot further inland, at the Lincoln Center Out of Doors festival. That band has a characteristically psychedelic, epic new album out; catch you next time around, amigos.

There’s another fantastic lineup starting at 7 PM tonight at Drom. With the snowstorm, this might be your chance to see an unusually intimate show featuring all kinds of global sounds from darkly slinky psychedelic boleros, to wild Ethiopian funk, to Moroccan trance grooves and more. Cover is an insanely cheap $10.

Intensely Tuneful, Paradigm-Shifting Indian and Middle Eastern Mashups from the Brooklyn Raga Massive

The Brooklyn Raga Massive got their start about five years ago at a ratty little Fort Greene bar. Since then, they’ve grown by leaps and bounds, made their Lincoln Center debut a couple of weeks ago, and have built a growing following via a popular weekly Wednesday residency at around 8:30 PM amid the spices wafting through the air at the comfortable, welcoming Art Cafe and Bar at the corner of Underhill and Pacific St. Cover is $15; the venue is roughly equidistant from the 2 train at Bergen St., the C at Clinton-Washington and the B at 7th Ave.

The group’s raison d’etre is to take the vast, richly tuneful universe of classic Indian sounds to new and exhilarating places. With its constantly shifting cast of members, the collective comprises a similarly wide swath of some of New York’s most adventurous Indian classical, jazz and rock talent. Last night was oud night. If you’re wondering what the centuries-old, otherworldly resonant low-register North African lute has to do with Indian music, there isn’t any historical connection…although this group is making it happen now. Ever wonder what a slinky levantine theme would sound like over a completely different but similarly snaky tabla groove? That was one of the mind-expanding mashups that oudist Brandon Terzic and tabla player Ehren Hanson tackled last night, to roaring applause.

Terzic explained that he was feeling especially psychedelic since he was jetlagged – although he didn’t seem any less energetic or wickedly precise than usual. As you would expect from a performance of Middle Eastern music, he opened a couple of numbers with brooding, slowly crescendoing improvisations lowlit with uneasy chromatics and microtones. Hanson matched the oudist’s energy with his steady, rippling rhythms, for the most part keeping a straight-ahead pulse going, at least when the two weren’t working a wry, polyrhythmic tug-of-war.

In case anyone was wondering why Terzic would switch to a completely different, West African tuning midway through the show, he explained that he wanted to make his oud sound like a kora since that harplike instrument can be so maddeningly difficult to play. Then the two romped through a lively, upbeat tune that could have been a Malian folk song. They reprised that vibe, a little more low-key, later on with a spare, dusky Nubian theme.

Klezmatics multi-reed polymath Matt Darriau joined them midway through, first playing flutes on a bristling, chromatically-fueled number that eventually morphed into a circling, crescendoing jam on what appeared to centuries-old carnatic riffage. It was a vivid illustration of how much cross-pollination there’s been between what was once the Persian empire and the Hindustani subcontinent. Given a one-chord jam to play along to, Darriau took the rhythmic route, hitting on the offbeat, then supplying tersely devious polyrhythmic accents rather than cluttering the tune. The trio wound up the set on an ominously relevant note with a Terzic number dedicated to the people of Syria, awash in grimly resonant grey-sky sonics over a stately, cautious midtempo beat, Darriau slithering through some of the evening’s most plaintive, subtly microtonally-infused washes.

Terzic’s next gig as a bandleader is Nov 22 at 7 PM at Barbes, followed by Brooklyn Balkan brass favorites Slavic Soul Party. Beyond his collaboration with Brooklyn Raga Massive,  Darriau can also typically be found at Barbes, his main hang these days when he’s not on the road. His next gig there is Nov 17 at 10 PM with his amazing Who Is Manny Blanc project, resurrecting the twistedly irresistible work of the legendary/obscure Lower East Side psychedelic Jewish jazz/esoterica composer. The Massive’s next gig, next Wednesday, Nov 9 features innovative oudist Tom Chess and his quartet. If you wish you’d been alive to witness the birth of bebop in Harlem in the 1940s, you could watch a similar kind of innovation happen right here, right now.