Afro-Caribbean bassist Santi Debriano fuses Yoruba ritual and jazz in his album Ashanti. A vibrant celebration of rhythm and community.
Panama-born and New York-based Santi Debriano steers away from
simplicity. The bassist-composer, who emigrated to the United States from
Panama at the age of four and later obtained an ethnomusicology graduate
degree from Wesleyan University has made a point to transpose
Afro-Caribbean tradition onto his compositional work. His latest mark,
Ashanti, finds West African language and ritual at its core. Alongside his
Arkestra Bembé, Debriano harnessed the power of the Yoruba tribe's bembé
-- a celebration involving food, drink, music and dance -- and fabricated his
own, pandemic-inspired jam session tradition of a similar intimacy. Countless
weeks of bembés yielded Ashanti, the stalwart bassist's eighth release as a
leader.
Back during the pandemic lock-down, Debriano made a sanctuary for New
York area jazz musicians deficient in a communal practice space. In the
basement of his Staten Island home, he would organize weekly bembés,
creating a musical lifeline, a means of survival, for artists until it was safe to
venture into the studio again. "At first, the weekly bembés were loose and
unstructured," Debriano shares. "But as they grew in size, it enticed me to start
expanding on my arrangements and experimenting with them."
These sessions afforded the bandleader the opportunity to fashion
compositions for a larger cast while witnessing fantastic interactions between
instrumentalists. As weeks went by, Debriano's compositional imagination
stretched in tandem with what would become his Arkestra Bembé.
Track Listing
Disc 1:
Angel Heart Ashanti Imaginary Guinea Imagined Nation Till Then Spunky Arkestra Boogaloo Basilar Mr Monk Portrait
