Dawn of Midi’s (from left) Qasim Naqvi, Aakaash Israni, and Amino Belyamani - Image: Falkwyn de Goyenche
.
* “Amino [Belyamani, the trio’s pianist] is from Morocco and has a pretty deep background in African music as a percussionist,” says Aakaash Israni, the troupe’s Indian bassist, from Melbourne, Australia, just prior to performing at the city’s jazz festival…“We’d like more and more for people to dance, and it’s starting to happen.” *
Listen to Dawn of Midi’s Dysnomia
.
Willamette Week, by Dave Cantor (Portland, Oregon, June 18, 2014) — It’s not necessarily a reconstitution of New Orleans’ Congo Square—that trading spot where, back in the early 20th century, African, European and indigenous cultures got jumbled up and spat out jazz—but New York’s Dawn of Midi is searching for a similar cultural confluence in its music. The acoustic trio’s latest album, Dysnomia, comes off like a batch of androids performing a 47-minute, through-composed statement of purpose. Its unbending structure, gifted to listeners from what looks like a jazz group, assimilates motorik beats and seemingly electronic patterns, and just might be as culturally inclusive as whatever happened down in Louisiana all those years back.
“Amino [Belyamani, the trio’s pianist] is from Morocco and has a pretty deep background in African music as a percussionist,” says Aakaash Israni, the troupe’s Indian bassist, from Melbourne, Australia, just prior to performing at the city’s jazz festival. “I knew that he had all this language, and we’d been nerding out about rhythmic ideas for a long time together.”
Turning in its debut, First, in 2010, Dawn of Midi arrived as a freely improvising group, indebted both to 1960s out-jazz and contemporary European classical works, but nothing among the dissonant piano, muted bass figures and scattershot drumming of third member Qasim Naqvi intimated the conceptual leap of the group’s next album. Dysnomia is ostensibly a percussion album, Israni says, with his bass and even Belyamani’s piano taking on a rhythmic quality. On “Atlas,” a few tracks into Dysnomia, the band hits a locked groove, repeating a phrase until the tension begs for release. Passages like this draw comparisons to krautrock ensembles and post-rock groups, but Dawn of Midi’s embrace of repetition is gleaned from African drumming traditions, not Western appropriations like Can or Tortoise.
[Continue Reading at Willamette Week…]
The post Dawn of Midi: Hypnotizing the World One Post-Jazz Groove at a Time – Willamette Week appeared first on Morocco On The Move.