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The Macrotones go beyond Afrobeat

SCENE & HEARD

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

February 08, 2012|By Martín Caballero

Drummer Aaron Duffy describes the Macrotones as 10 guys, some danceable…

By the time trombonist Nate Leskovic walks in the door last Monday night, his nine bandmates in the Macrotones have been talking in the living room of his Charlestown apartment for over a half-hour. Without interrupting, he grabs a Narragansett out of the refrigerator, pulls up a stool on the far side of the room, and sits down, listening intently but not entering the conversation as the band answers questions ahead of their headlining show at the Middle East Upstairs on Feb. 17. As the interview session begins to wrap up, he finally chimes in with a telling contribution.

“I would just like to stress that we are not an Afrobeat band,’’ says Leskovic, an original member of the group, which has seen various incarnations since its foundation in 2007. “In a way, I think Afrobeat is kind of beat. We are trying to do our own thing with it. It’s a style that’s kind of ‘take it or leave it,’ and we put our own spin on that.’’

This kind of genre hair-splitting isn’t unusual for a band seeking to define its style -“spy music,’’ as they like to call it - which drummer Aaron Duffy says emerged during the recording of their 2011 album, “First Signs of Danger’’ (Young Cub Records). But despite their equivocations, the sound that pulsed from the rehearsal space in Leskovic’s garage an hour earlier owes at least some of its inspiration to the robust percussion flavors and punchy horn sections that colored works from Afrobeat pioneers like Fela Kuti and Tony Allen. The band’s development owes as much to its identification with that genre as it does with its desire to escape the constraints that accompany it.

Case in point: founding members Duffy, Leskovic, guitarist Brian Gagne, bassist John Beaudette, and bassist Nate Smith met upon answering a Craigslist ad seeking musicians for an Afrobeat band, but soon found the group leader’s purist leanings too much to bear (“He literally described himself as the spiritual son of Fela Kuti,’’ is Duffy’s description of their former colleague). Reassembling on their own, they began playing together at Duffy’s apartment in lower Allston and figuring out what their new incarnation would, and would not, be.

“We were originally called ‘Mzungu,’ which means ‘white boy’ in Swahili,’’ deadpans Duffy. “We thought it was too spot-on.’’