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August 2, 2007

Music Review | Kassav'

A Wide Range of Sounds, From Antillean to Zouk

It has been more than a decade between New York City shows for Kassav', the band from Martinique and Guadeloupe that has brought French Antillean music to an international audience since the 1980s and regularly sells out large theaters in Europe. On Tuesday night, with a sold-out audience at S.O.B.'s, Kassav' had obviously not been forgotten. Audience members shouted along on nearly every song, singing not only the words but also the zigzagging horn-section lines. And Kassav' has had so many hits it had to pack them into medleys.

Kassav' was a pioneer of a musical style called zouk — it rhymes with juke, and means party — that defines cultural survival via assimilation. The band records in Paris, but at the core of its songs is a jovial midtempo beat from Antillean carnival music — originally played on a log drum — that's kin to Haitian compas and Trinidadian calypso. Back in the 1980s Kassav' put the log drum at the center of its stage setup; now that drum is absent but the beat persists. The lyrics are in Kreyol, the Africanized French still used in the islands, and they revolve around love, dancing, the Caribbean sun and the healing power of zouk itself.

The core members of the band — Jacob Desvarieux on guitar, Georges Decimus on bass and Jean-Claude Naimro on keyboards — play electric instruments. And the songs cheerfully borrow from French pop, salsa, fusion jazz or electronica, all of which Kassav' dovetails with its Antillean beat. In one song two of the band's singers, Jean-Philippe Marthely and Jocelyne Beroard, hooked elbows and swung their partner as if they were at a square dance.

On albums Kassav' can sound a little too slick, conforming to French pop tastes. But onstage it concentrated on dance tunes and shed some layers of unnecessary gloss. The band had three contrasting lead singers: Mr. Desvarieux, who was gruff and smoky; Mr. Marthely, a buoyant tenor; and Ms. Beroard, whose voice can be bright and poppy or sweetly affectionate. Mr. Naimro's keyboards could sound like zinging dance-club synthesizers, an accordion, a steel drum or the clarinet used in old Martinican biguine music. Mr. Desvarieux's guitar sometimes hinted at blues-rock or the intertwining lines of African rock before slipping back into the rhythm section. Slower tunes had an easygoing lilt and upbeat ones galloped, while somewhere in the mix, echoes of carnival beats carried them all.

NYC: Kassav' will perform on Saturday night (August 4th) at the Prospect Park Band Shell as part of Celebrate Brooklyn; (718) 855-7882.