Thoughts On A 'Post-Afrobeat Dance Explosion': NOMO In Concert

You wouldn't necessarily call NOMO a jazz group, though as a touring band it certainly could pass for one. A week ago at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art, it carried a front line of trumpet, tenor sax and baritone sax, plus bass, drums and a guitarist who alternated between his electric axe and a second drum kit. There were also keyboards, samplers and amplified kalimbas, but the point is that it looked and felt like a jazz outfit. (A free jazz outfit, really.) Its horn players took improvised solos, its rhythm section played busy grooves appropriated from somewhere in the African diaspora and the compositions felt thought-through in an art-music sort of way.

The boundary between jazz and not-jazz has always been fluid, from the hodgepodge that was early 1900s New Orleans, to the sweet dance bands of the Jazz Age and Swing Era, to the sentimental balladeers backed by jazz instrumentation, to fusion or freely improvised music. In this case, there were a few lines in the sand. When pressed to self-identify with category, bandleader Elliot Bergman has issued this statment in press bios: "We are an American band, and in our hearts I think we're more of a rock band than anything else, but we do love so many different types of music." Not much of the music had a whole lot of harmonic variation to it; the songs were largely built on one or two chord vamps and pre-programmed electronics. (Which could have grown tiresome if the set had been much longer.) There was backbeat-heavy rhythm in surplus, though little that came close to swing. And of course, the fact that the homemade thumb pianos, not to mention many of the arrangements, so clearly referenced the trappings of Afrobeat — but don't call NOMO an Afrobeat band — made it difficult not to think, "Ooh, vaguely African dance music!"

But the jazz connection is real here.

 

I spoke briefly with Elliot after the set, and he said that he and the band had all gone to school together at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. And one doesn't really go to music school with a tenor saxophone, as Bergman did, to not be immersed in jazz pedagogy. (Baritone saxophonist Dan Bennett had especial control of his unwieldy horn in a way that only comes after much practice learning and inverting jazz.) Today, much of the group lives in Chicago, where some are involved with the thriving improvised music community — NOMO itself has even appeared with AACM stalwarts Fred Anderson and Nicole Mitchell. The band's dedication to out-jazz is readily evident; with Warn Defever of His Name Is Alive, who produced NOMO's latest records, it's recorded a Marion Brown tribute album, and one of NOMO's first singles was a cover of Sun Ra's "Rocket #9."

Live, "Rocket #9" was a clear highlight, with tight, energetic playing coalescing in unison chants: "Rocket Number Nine take off, for the planet / For the planet / Venus!" Another was "Bumbo," the band's version of a Moondog tune recorded on the new album Invisible Cities, where a repeating melody fragment was stated only for layers of countermelody, noise and improvisation to overtake it. On songs like "Brainwave," Bergman turned to his array of samplers, keyboards and homemade instruments for colorful textures which morphed into driving beats once joined by the full band. And when the band's second drummer, whose name I didn't catch, went to the guitar, the difference was felt: the group felt fuller, as if a hole in the polyphony had been occupied.

In case you hadn't noticed, I'm occasionally interested in where jazz intersects not-jazz for a number of reasons. One is that often really good music thrives in the category vacuum, though it's looked down upon by jazz people, somewhat unfairly I think. (This sort of thing is often bad music too, but I don't like to think about those examples.) Another is that I spot jazz aesthetics in a lot of modern music, and I'm interested in spelling out why. Yet another: jazz can learn from the action happening at its "porous borders," to co-opt Nate Chinen's phrase.

A smart promoter observing the show might have noticed several things. First, that the bill was shared with Dutty Artz, a wildly wide-ranging collective of DJs Matt Shadetek and DJ /rupture (aka Jace Clayton) with dancehall vocalist Jahden Blakkamoore. "A spectacular co-bill of innovative, African-influenced music," said the promotional Web page (the same page that aptly described NOMO as a "post-afrobeat dance explosion"). Also, that it was held in a sort of outdoor amphitheater with both seating and floor space. As the crowd filled in, it began to migrate down to the standing room: first the eccentric dancers, then your average revelers. And when the band closed on "Nu Tones," they paraded out through the middle of the crowd with their saxophones and floor toms, leading a swaying group chant. (I've seen drummer Matt Wilson do this before, so there must be other jazz precedents of this sort too.) By then, the band had won over the crowd, slow-to-arrive and hesitant to participate, such that the moment felt oddly cathartic.

The point is that this white-boy instrumental group, steeped in a hairy jazz approach, got people (who paid $25/ticket plus charges) physically out of their seats. Their sound wasn't quite what you'd find in a sitting-audience jazz club, but it wasn't entirely hedonistic either; a good deal of rigor clearly went into developing the band's concept. Perhaps it was the marketing, the billing, the space — for sure it was the music — either way, it made for an entirely satisfying experience.

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More on NOMO: a 2008 NPR interview and photo gallery of homemade instruments.