Call them Afropolitan. Call their sound ReggHopFunk Fusion, by way of Ghana and Harvard Yard. Call this team of beaming musicians (with not one, but three soaring vocalists) P-Funk progeny, channeling Manu Dibango and Sly Stone and Rage Against the Machine.
Whatever you want to dub them, this weekend’s performance by Soulfege at Manhattan’s Knitting Factory was a rare treat in these way-ironic days: a full-on groove group powering out songs with upbeat melodies to match their message—one of global community and connectedness, conveyed with such energy, assuredness, and good will that they transcended the ironic, transformed the conversation, and transported the listener beyond the otherwise dismal and downbeat world around them.
Soulfege (a term for the diatonic “do-re-mi” music scale) is led by Derrick Ashong, a West African-raised, Harvard-educated, L.A.-based singer-songwriter (his moniker: D.N.A.), actor (Steven Spielberg’s Amistad), lecturer, and political activist. (In February, I blogged about his viral YouTube video, on his passion for Barak Obama.) On Saturday, with his fellow choirmates from his college days, Jonathan Gramling and Keely Nicole Johnson, Ashong and company echoed and built on one another’s buoyancy, backed by thick, sick basslines and drum-and-bongo beats. (They just won Billboard’s Best Hip Hop Songwriting contest.)
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2008/04/david-friend-af.html
