Johnny D’s would never be mistaken for a hipster bar. Far from the laser lights of Lansdowne in Davis Square, it is a cozy family-owned bar with plenty of seating and dim lighting that encourages a degree of unselfconscious ease, of gentle abandon, on the little square of dancefloor below the small stage. You get the feeling that the patrons, even the ones dancing (perhaps especially the ones dancing) aren’t here for the band – this is just their regular drinking spot. Thursdays is Krucial Reggae, but mixed in is an array of blues and “world music” – the AfroBrazil drumming ensemble and Malian virtuoso Bassekou Kouyate are upcoming.
This week, the international guest was Sarazino, a band of reggae mongrels lead by Lamine Fellah, who seems to have lived more or less everywhere between being born in Algeria and settling in Ecuador.
This blithe “what border?” attitude that is characteristic of their US label, the independent Vermont-based Cumbancha, has taken up the task of dismantling the coffee-table ghetto of “world music” with a roster of well-traveled killer acts both explicitly exotic and comfortably cosmopolitan (Zimbabwe’s Chiwoniso, Sarazino’s labelmate, plays the MFA on July 21st). Ya Foy!, Sarazino's first album for Cumbancha, features appearances by Toots Hibbert and Blanquito Man; the title means No Problems in Dioula. Just the idea of it can give you jetlag.
Fellah’s songs take advantage of the spacious structure of reggae and his rocksteady band to magpie ingredients from more or less anywhere, all while keeping the end result reliably upbeat. He introduced each song with a parable about the ladies and a big lopsided grin that knocked his hipster glasses askew. He summoned a fellow Algerian to play sax on “Nadia,” deftly demonstrating how geographically notional was the distance from Kingston to Algiers to Quito. The magisterially-named singer Revelino Aguidissou (b. Benin) sang with percussive precision and more than sufficient sweat and swagger to own his zebra-print James Brown shirt.
If Sarazino had a message – other than about the pitfalls of pretty girls – it was that a party is a party wherever there’s a bassline and a dancefloor.
