Global Roots primer: Red Baraat "Aims to Bring the Party"

With Global Roots less than two months away, seem like it's about time to educate myself about some of these new acts.  Looking at the lineup, I am very familiar with one of the acts and don't know thing one about the other seven.

Let's start with Tuesday night's opener, Brooklynites Red Baraat.  Yee HAW!  Live Bhangra!  What could be more fun than that?  How about live Bhangra with a funky horn section? CHECK.

(Wait, Mama E.  What is this "bhangra" of which you speak?  Before we get deeply into a definition, just imagine the wedding scene at the end of Bend it Like Beckham.  All the relatives are dancing with their arms in the air and the band is on stage with some guy playing a big sidewise drum. Got it?  That's Bhangra, folks.

Well. I am having a little trouble finding that exact snippet of Bend it Like Beckham, so how about the big dance scene from one of Gurinder Chradha's other films, Bride and Prejudice.  So wonderfully over the top!  The music is much more traditional Bollywood here, too, but you gotta love the beat. Boy, there sure are lots of Indian wedding videos up on You Tube!

Take a musical genre which originated during harvest festivals, and included a percussion instrument (the dhol) originally used in warfare by the Sikhs, then travel through time via Punjabi weddings  and  New Year's celebrations to arrive at the 1990's in the techno crazed South Asian emigant population of the London suburbs, at which point it was fused with hip-hop, house, reggae and pretty much any other genre around.  Bhangra has been a lot of things and a lot of places , but no matter how dolled up, that beat is always infectious, and the mood is alway partytime.

Which leads us directly to Red Baraat.  They canned the flute and other trad bhangra instruments acompanying the dhol, left behind the usual keyboard, and went directly to four plus piece horn section, picking up two more percussionists along the way.   Louder, crazier, funkier...  (I already used up my one "Yee HAW" for this post, didn't I.  Shoot.)

A "baraat" is the parade-like procession a groom takes through all the revelers on the way to his bride at a traditional big North Indian wedding.  The band was actually formed with some of the guys who got together to play for band leader (and dhol player) Sunny Jain's wedding baraat a few years ago.   They still play several dozen weddings a year. As things evolved, they wanted a bhangra band that could also march, so the whole works skewed toward New Orleans style second line marching brass in the best of modern freaky fusion. 

More tidbits on the back story of the band in this interesting interview Sunny Jain did with National Geographic music earlier this year. He touches on everything from the relationship between modern Gypsy brass music with Indian trad to how dancing to bhangra looks.

If you want to check out their sound live, here's a link to a stream of a Red Baraat show at Club Barbes in Brooklyn a few months back.

Anyway, lots more about the band on the Cedar listing linked below.  With these guys opening for a hip 10 piece Gypsy Brass band direct from Romania (Mahala Rai Banda), I hope the walls are still standing at the end of the night of Tuesday, September 21.