Red Baraat at Smith's Olde Bar, Atlanta, April 4, 2014

Still catching up . . .  here's my pics and commentary (such as it is) on the Red Baraat show at Smith's Olde Bar last Friday night.

The show opener, Atlanta's The Dialect Trio, were a revelation.  Where have these guys been hiding, and why haven't I heard them before?  The "trio" took the stage as a quartet and played a great amalgam of various world musics, incorporating elements of Hindustani pop, Afro pop, reggae, Cumbia, and various Afro-Cuban rhythms, with pleasingly Santana-esque guitar.  They described their style as "Chichia," a psychedelic, surf-inspired form of Cumbia popular in Peru.  Their Bandcamp site lists a full dozen albums and EPs, so they've obviously been around for a while - perhaps they've just been playing in an alternative universe of clubs and venues than I've been attending.

Here's a great video of them set to a memorable scene from Rodriguez' From Dusk 'Til Dawn (written and featuring Quentin Tarantino), posted here for The Dialect Trio's music and because you can never get too much Selma Hayek.

Headliners Red Baraat may be from Brooklyn, New York, but their music is from the Asian subcontinent by way of New Orleans, which is to say this is what a second line brass band might sound like in the India Quarter of the Crescent City, if such a thing even existed.  

To say they got the party started and the audience up and dancing would be an understatement - it was clearly the band's singular aim and mission in the very same manner as, say, the Dirty Dozen or Rebirth Brass Bands.  

There was a large contingent of Indians in the audience - I've never seen more turbans in an audience at any show before - engaged in a friendly, South Asian form of moshing, which involves two or more people locking feet or hands in the center of a circle, and then spinning around the center as rapidly as possible.  It was fun, and I speak from personal experience as late in the show I got pulled into one of those circles by an outgoing young man.

The band is led by percussionist Sunny Jain, whose hard driving North Indian bhangra rhythms merge with the five-man horn section's elements of jazz, funk, and hip-hop, and if you've never experienced a Sikh rapping over brass-band funk before, then you've got to catch Red Baraat.

This is the kind of band that really needs to be experienced live in order to be appreciated, so here's a little taste of Friday's show and a video below from a show in their native Brooklyn to give you a rough approximation of the joyful multiculturalism of their performance.