Toubab Krewe Returns w/New Album

World beat fusion like you ain't never heard before, from the western mountains of NC.

By Blurt Staff

Asheville's Toubab Krewe, whose West African-meets-US-psych/surf/rock/funk style creates "the national music of a country with no name that appears on no map" (JamBase) will have their third album (and second studio release) issued by Nat Geo Music September 7th. It's titled TK2 and follows 2009's Live at the Orange Peel - which BLURT described thusly:

"This, my friends, is where fusion becomes fervor: Toubab Krewe has such a visceral, ear-yanking quality that in the band's capable hands you just might find your definitions of what is/is not rock ‘n' roll and worldbeat being completely rewritten. This is the sound of liberation."

 
A favorite at festivals worldwide from Tennessee's Bonnaroo to Africa's Festival au Desert and at packed shows around the U.S., the longtime friends formed the band in 2005 and traveled to Mali, Guinea, and Ivory Coast to study and perform. The band's name, like their music, is a fusion of cultures: "Toubab" means "foreigner" in Mali's Bambara language and "Krewe" is a salute to New Orleans.
 

'TK2' deepens the Toubab Krewe experience to create an album that is a full-on tripped-out headphones experience as well as a dance party the Village Voice describes as "a futuristic, psychedelic, neo-grit frenzy."

Percussionist Luke Quaranta talked to BLURT not long ago and described the album sessions:

We had done a few recording session over that year [2007]; our first record came out in '05 and we had cut that when we were just together about four months together as a band. So then we had a couple of years of touring and a good amount of material that we wanted to get out there. We had cut versions of new songs that we'd been performing live, and listening back it sounded fine, but it maybe sounded like we were just trying to get "versions" of already fully-realized songs. For us, it made us realize that we really wanted to go in the studio and have a different experience versus going in there with fully-formed ideas.

    So in the process of mixing those tracks in the studio we listened back to the two nights at the Orange Peel we thought, "This sounds great. This is this batch of songs, recorded in our environment, in front of our home crowd, a lot of energy, a lot of improvisation within the songs that maybe we didn't capture in the studio because this was more on the fly and in the moment. So we decided to put the album out. It definitely captured the essence of our band at that time and our sound.

    Then it also inspired us to do the studio thing differently. After that whole experience we knew we wanted to approach the studio in a different way. Starting in last September we spent six weeks at Echo Mountain here in Asheville. We started from scratch. We'd been touring real heavily and also writing songs, and we hadn't pressed "pause" - continuing to write music at soundcheck, exploring ideas while touring. So when we stopped and went into the studio, we brought in all this instrumentation we'd never used but that people do play in the group - like congas, 12-string acoustic guitar, fiddle, grand piano, organ and Leslie, even a Moog voyager. We really branched out with this instrumentation and spent the first week just experimenting with sound and jamming.

    Echo Mountain is great, with these old analog boards, so we cut everything to tape and had a really great, warm sound. Then we went back, listening and picking out ideas that had come up, and writing music from those stream of consciousness jamming sessions. It was a different process for us, but I think we got some great tunes and captured them very close to the moment of inspiration, the seed of the idea, rather than being out on the road for six months and then cutting it in the studio. A lot of things formed during the actual takes we used, so that's the process we were wanting.

Watch for our interview with the band in the fall print issue of BLURT and also on the website.

Toubab Krewe are Teal Brown (drums), Drew Heller (guitar), Justin Perkins (kora, kamel ngoni, guitar), David Pransky (bass) and Luke Quaranta (percussion).