ANTIBALAS Interview UK 2005

"What's beautiful about Afrobeat" says Martin Perna (founder of Antibalas)" is that at the very same time it's dance music and it's resistance music, music with a political message, music of struggle, music challenging the powers."

"Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra" is a group of musicians with roots as diverse as their sounds: African, European, Middle Eastern, Latin... However, they all have the same goal: to spread a different image of America, a more human America in which everything does not have a price tag, an America in which war isn't a way to make peace, an America in which there are differing viewpoints regarding George Bush's agenda.

If Antibalas is clearly a politically fueled band, it is above all a group of magnificent artists: their music is lively; the African rhythms intertwine beautifully with funk and jazz.

The band tours extensively all around the world. They also opened for other great artists like James Brown and Wyclef Jean.

Martin Perna, founder of Antibalas, decided to create the band in 1997 to perpetuate the message of Fela Kuti, who died that same year.

In this interview, Martin shares with passion and conviction the artistic and political aspects of the Antibals Afrobeat Orchestra.

Martin Perna, founder of Antibalas

1.How do you feel about touring throughout Europe this spring ?

This is our fourth or fifth time to Europe. Usually we're going in the summers and doing the festivals. This trip to France is mostly in clubs. This is the first time we are actually traveling a lot around France. We're doing nine or ten shows there. It 's exciting, especially because there is in France more interest for African music. Mostly because of the colonization and the immigration from West Africa. So many people understand that music a lot more and connect with it a lot more in France then say in Norway. I mean, wherever we've gone, even in Japan, people really connect with the music but as far as more immediate connection, I feel it more in France. Also people there have seen the first generation of Afro-beat: Fela used to go play France a bit, you know, especially in the early eighties through the nineties. And there's also Afro-beat going on in Paris. Also there is a group called "Massak" from Marseille, I think. We are really excited to go over there. And eat some good food! Laugh

2.Good food is indeed one of the perks when touring across France! (Laugh) Are you touring in the States also these days ?

After this French tour, we have a month long tour through the south: Texas, California...basically the whole western US . And it looks that we'll be back in France, Spain, some other European countries in July, and then again in August and then again in October. So over the next seven months, I think we are going to make at least three trips to France. Maybe even four.

3.How important is performing for a group like yours ?

The live show is really what we want people to come and see. The record is a musical product just like you have orange juice and you have the actual orange which is the live performance. It's that different. That's where it's happening : live. I think we all like our records, but we like performing a lot better. Cause that's always different. We probably have about fifty different songs. And each song is about ten or twelve minutes and sometimes about twenty minutes long. We're constantly playing different material, always writing new material. So whenever people see us, they see a different show.

4.Do you have time during those tours to interact with the audience, or other people ?

That's a part of the fun although a lot of times we don't have the time at all. But it's very good to get out of United States because the way the media is here , you have to leave the US to actually see what's going on in the US. The television, the radio, the newspapers are actually better in Europe about what the US is doing right now. So it's good to leave the country to find out what's going on in the country and have real conversations with people from other countries.

5.When did you realize that you needed to leave the US to realize what was going on within its borders and beyond ?

I knew that from when I was a little kid. From the first time I left the country to go to Costa Rica where I have some family. I was about twelve years old. I was living with them . Just seeing how the US was perceived: the US being a great country in so many ways, it is also so horrible in many other ways. And inside it's unable to criticize itself. So it's good to see that outside. And also to meet people and let people know that there is resistance in the States and we're proof of it. Just a tiny bit of the millions and millions of people who are trying to create a different America, a more peaceful America. The political debate is a privilege that we try to make the most of , when we travel.

6.Are you from Costa Rican descent ?

I have Mexican family who married into Costa Rican family . Mexico and Southern Italy: That's where my grandparents came from. I was born in Philadelphia and grew up between Philadelphia and New York

7.What are your first musical memories as a child ?

I always loved listening to music from the time I was little. I remember "Off The Wall" by Michael Jackson, my first record. You can say what you want about Michael, but he put up some great records! And then I remember the cover of Mickey Mouse disco! (Laugh)

8.That I don't remember! (Laugh)

You don't need to remember that! (Laugh) Also a Mexican children's song called "Cri Cri". Then I grew up listening to different things. My parents had pretty good music. My dad liked jazz, fusion-jazz... Some of the funkiest stuff too: that I would end up hearing fifteen years later. And I was listening to whatever was on the radio; in Philadelphia, we listened to a radio called Power 99 which was where you could hear rap around 1981. Every night at 9 pm they had a countdown. We were into break dancing, just anything that had to do with New York. I remember when I went to New York for the first time. It had a big impression on me.

At "Tonic", New York City, April 21st 2005

9.How did you choose saxophone as an instrument ?

I was introduced to saxophone when I was twelve or thirteen. And I didn't really like it. 'Cause all the music we were playing was very boring to me. So I did other things. Then when I was nineteen I had some friends who were jazz musicians who would come over my house and play . And I never like to just sit and watch ! (Smile) So I started playing saxophone and aside from a couple of lessons, I am pretty much self-taught. But then just being around other really good musicians who have studied a lot , I' ve learned a lot of good habits and techniques from them.

10.Did not knowing the rules help you in a way ?

I think so: not having a formal education in music has some very good things and some very bad things about it: on one hand, I think you can be a lot more fearless because you don't even know what the rules are ; so you don't know whether you break them, you just do it. To a certain extent, that was good; I had so much energy! But on the other hand it was sometimes difficult for the musicians to follow me when I was doing the conducting; I wasn't the best communicator especially after smoking a lot of weed .(Laugh) After two or three years we decided to have the trombone player take over. Besides having a very tight musical mind, he's easier to see as a conductor .

11.How did you discover Afro-beat music ?

I started playing music at nineteen and around one or two years later, one of my friends from college Gabriel Roth started a record label with a guy named Philippe Lehman who's originally from Paris. They put out all these funk records with singers like Sharon Jones, Naomi Davis, ... I was playing tenor on some of these records. And they made a record called the Daktaris , that was like an Afro beat funk record and asked me to be on it. So I played saxophone and flute on five or six of the songs. And I loved that music very much . I started really listening heavily to Fela's music. That's when I realized that it was what I wanted to do.

12.Can you tell me more about Fela's message throughout a couple of his songs ?

One of the classic ones would be "Zombie", that's one of his most famous songs. And "Zombie" refers to the policemen and the soldiers who forget their own mind and consciousness and just do what they're told. They're told to go right then they go right, then they're told to turn around, so they turn around, then they're told to kill, so they kill. And a song like that is very important 'cause police and soldiers are just human beings on one level just like you and I. But on the other hand, a lot of times they lose their humanity when they obey official orders. If the President tells a soldier to kill, he stops being a human and becomes something else. Or when a policeman kills a protester, he stops being human and becomes some sort of a monster. I think that's one of the heaviest of Fela's tunes.

Fela Kuti

Another famous one is called :"Colonial Mentality". It talks about people of colonized countries. He is specifically in the song speaking to West Africans of former English, French, Spanish, German and Portuguese colonies . But it really refers to everywhere. It refers to Latin America, South East Asia, the Caribbean. The political administrations of the colonial powers have left, but the mentality, the mental conditioning remains. So that people in Senegal might leave, forget everything from Senegal and look to France for everything that's valuable as far as culture, education, etc. So on one hand they learn to love another country and in the same time, hate their own culture. It's a statement that the more you hate your native culture, the less free you are. During colonialism, different things were put into place: different ways of education, religion, government administration, commerce... Even though if people are not slaves anymore, mentally they're still slaves. The song encourages people to think of the ways of life before colonialism.

13.How did you decide to put a band together ?

Right after Fela died, this was in 1997, I had this idea to start up a band that was doing Afro-beat music and also some more funk and Latin and salsa sounds. That was the first Antibalas

14.What's in that name ?

Literally it means in Spanish against bullets. I think it's really important in the US to make a stand if you really believe in peace. The mainstream ,we think, is pushing for war and violence, it's a very violent country, both inside and outside. And I think it was important to always make a statement against that.

15.How do you guys compose your songs ?

Usually a lot of groups go into the studio and start writing. For us, we'll write and then play the songs for a year and try to change them. And once we get into the studio, we record them and then usually not play them that much anymore after that

16.That's unusual! How come ?

We try to perfect it before we go to the studio . A lot of times , we realize we've been playing these songs for two years and we still didn't record them. We better record them before we get sick of them! (Smile)

17.That's an original concept. Did you see others doing it this way ?

Actually that's how Fela Kuti recorded. He would play a song and most of his songs were very topical songs like about political or spiritual themes. He would play it and then once he recorded it, he would never perform it again. If you like the song, buy the record! (Smile) It's similar with us. We still do play songs that we have recorded but our process is that we take a song, play it for a long time, record it and then move on to new stuff.

18. So I guess your last album is politically charged if we take into consideration what happened the last twelve months...

The most recent album we put out is called: "Who is this America?".That question means that the name of "America" cannot properly describe what's going on within its borders right now.

"Who is this America?" album cover

19. What do you mean exactly by that ?

The Unites States are many countries within one, it's many different realities within one. In America, if you are white and rich, it is very different than if you are white and poor, very different if you're black and poor. The country is divided in so many different ways. It's different if you're an immigrant who's come recently from Mexico, from Central America, from Pakistan or India: their immigration experience is very different than Germans' who came one hundred years ago, as far as the privileges and what they're not getting. And so it's sort of very hypocritical to say that's there one America. When George Bush says he talks in the name of America, he's not talking about me, he's not talking about anybody in the group. He does not speak for us. Yet somehow he says that all Americans have given him the mandate to bomb Iraq, Iran or Syria. So that song "Who is this America?" is challenging that idea of this one flag that represents a whole country 'cause we don't believe that it does.

20.Do you consider this album more like a political statement than a musical statement ?

Each other tune tries to say something. What 's beautiful about Afro-beat is that at the very same time it's a dance music and it's a resistance music, a music with a political message, a music of struggle, a music challenging the powers. And that's very important because I don't think you can have a music that just nourishes your spirit: it has to give you something to move to. And the act of dancing is very political. Dancing has been political for generations. In the beginning of this century, we saw a very similar pseudo-Christian morality where dancing was illegal in some places in United States. And then it was okay to dance again; but in New York, for instance, a lot of the white European Americans from downtown would want to go up to Harlem and see Jazz and get down and just socialize. Then these laws called "cabaret laws "were passed. You had to have a license to have liquor, a separate license to have music and a separate license to have dancing!

21.Isn't it still in effect ?

Yes, it is!! For many years, they stopped enforcing them. But then recently they started reinforcing them again.

22.How do you explain that dancing can be considered as a threat ?

Dancing has always been political because you get more free when you dance: your body's moving, your arms , legs are stretching out, different parts of your brain start working in different ways, and you can begin to shake off a lot of the conditioning when you're dancing ; and in the same time if you combine that with a message somewhere in there, then it can be a very powerful thing because anything done to rhythm can be sustained for a lot longer time, whether you're working or marching. That's how African slaves in the US were able to survive when they were working in the fields. That's how twelve or fourteen hours a day in Brazil they were cutting sugar cane. It's because they had songs and they had rhythm to get them through all that work. Not just African people but also Irish coal minors, sailors...Throughout history, everybody has these songs that they do, that they work to, and that they do rhythm to... And we need to continue. People that are doing very hard work today need some rhythm to do that hard work too. Afro-beat is very much a part of that.

23.What sets you apart from most of the other Afro-beat groups ?

I think that one thing that sets us apart from most of the other groups that are playing Afro-beat is that in the seven years that the band has been performing, we've connected with most of the major architects of Afro-beat that played with Fela, that were part of his band: we've performed with his son Femi maybe four or five times. He sat with the group and performed. Babatunde Williams who's the lead trumpeter and soloist on all the records from 1965 to 1978 played with us too. Also Tony Allen who is the original Afro-beat drummer.

Photo by Michael DiDonna

24.How do you see the next five years for the Band ?

Just to continue making better records, growing as artists...We also need to make more money. It's not that we are in it for; but it is a full time job; and because the Band is so big, that's many mouths to feed. It's like having a really big family. Many of us want to have children, but we can't support them. And the ones who do have children have a very difficult time supporting them. Even though many people know us and we are traveling all around, it's very expensive to keep a band this big together. This last record sold more than the previous one but at the same time I think that downloading and copying has really hurt us a lot. On the last tour that we did in the US, our booking agent said that normally for the amount of people that attended our shows, he would have thought that we would have sold four times as many records. It's hard cause everybody does it: I've copied but it's usually harder to get stuff, usually out of print or Vinyl.

25.There is right now a huge controversy in France about downloading. What's your take on that ?

I guess it depends on what level the artist is at. When a band is working really hard and not making a lot of money, I think they have the right to be angry about downloading. But if they've already made a lot of money, then they shouldn't be. But us, we really need every penny that we can get. And so I think it's important that if you can get it, if you have the money to buy and you want to support the band, you should. I am happy for everybody to listen to it. However, if they can't afford it, I am happy that they can download it for sure. But if they can afford it, it would be cool if they supported us like that. Or at least come and see us live. Cause that's another way they can support us and allow us to afford keeping more music in the years to come.