![]() ![]() “I come from sort of a purist mindset, where I want to do everything as close as possible to the original way it was done back whenever, and really absorb the language before we just walk into another musical territory,” Pradhan says. Over nine tracks of originals and covers, Combo Lulo pay a melancholy rocksteady tribute to Henry Mancini (“Para Mancini”), meld boogaloo and salsa (“Candela”), trip out on spacey Ethio-reggae (“Enter The Nethermead”), and bring a big band swing to moody dub-cumbia on “ Hudsonica.” Some of the songs were pieces Sarason had laying around, while others were arranged in tandem with saxophonist/arranger Anant Pradhan (who leads his own eponymous instrumental reggae project). The styles never were just one thing to begin with.” And while it’s fun to nail a style, “our heroes who invented these styles were always combining shit too. “Everyone’s contributing their own thing to it and taking it to an even cooler level,” Sarason says of the band’s background in reggae, Afrobeat and Latin music. Keyboardist and bandleader Mike Sarason, who plays in several reggae projects and recently released his own album debut, says he consciously tried to “crossbreed the band” to stretch beyond everyone’s comfort zone. Combo Lulo’s debut LP, “ Neotropic Dream,” was released on local label Names You Can Trust in early May.Īhead of the Natty Garden gig in late May, musicians from Antibalas, the Easy Star Allstars, the Skatalites, Charles Bradley & his Extraordinaires, and the Far East sat in a plant-filled Crown Heights backyard-the studio where they recorded “Neotropic” over a couple years in the basement below. The nonet-comprising four horns, keys, and two percussionists-began as an instrumental studio project but has since grown into one of the city’s most innovative bands, having cracked the formula for connecting sounds from the Caribbean diaspora. A less studied band might throw off the audience with such genre fluidity, but Combo Lulo’s all-star roster of players groove deftly, weaving the threads that form the fabric of New York City’s Caribbean music history. ![]() If you strolled past Prospect Heights nursery Natty Garden on an unseasonably warm spring evening, you’d have been treated to sounds of Colombian cumbia, Jamaican rocksteady and Ethio-jazz-all emanating from a single group. ![]()
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