Songcatchers Use Music To Blend Cultures
The SongCatchers Saturday, March 11, The Met
“We’ve got a long way to go,” sighed the SongCatchers’ Lara Lavi during a breather from the flow of autograph-seekers in The Met lobby Saturday night.
The SongCatchers had just finished their touching, rambunctious set, and Lavi was signing posters for a steady stream of shy little girls.
A middle-aged woman, the mother of one of the band members, approached. The women hugged.
“I’m working on him,” Lavi assured her. “I’m gonna make sure he gets that GED.”
“This group is more than a band,” Lavi said later. “It’s a family. It’s a social services group.”
The SongCatchers are also an accident, the unexpected outcome of a 1991 Seattle jam session. One night, Lavi and her blues band, Red Dog Zen, were joined onstage by Mark Smith and Arlie Neskahi of the White Eagle Singers, a respected Indian drumming group.
The collaboration worked in a way no one expected, and the two groups merged. Charles Neville of the Neville Brothers joined as an official part-time member, and the group signed a contract with A&M Records. Red Dog Zen and White Eagle continue as separate entities.
Saturday night, the SongCatchers - minus Neville, who is on the road with the Neville Brothers - both vindicated A&M’s support and prompted Lavi’s semiapologetic reaction.
Musically, the SongCatchers are above reproach - their blend of Native American, pop and R&B influences is provocative and exciting - but they have yet to master the tricky stagecraft that will bring the concept fully to life.
It won’t be easy, because if there ever was a challenging marriage of ideas, this is it. Imagine a blues/pop band with a built-in powwow section, or an Indian drum group with a rock outfit playing backup.
Imagine a rock guitar screaming over the powwow drums, an R&B beat under a native chant, a fiddle dueting with a wood flute over guitar, piano and drums.
The set opened with “Neon Sky,” a song Lavi wrote after meeting a homeless woman. “I sleep in streets of fire,” she sang, “I don’t need a reason.”
The White Eagle Singers beat thunderous sounds on a big powwow drum while a rock guitar cried and the keyboard player laid haunting synthesizer textures underneath it all.
David Madera, a fancy-dancer from the Colville Nation, emerged from stage left, resplendent in turquoise and white, his head wreathed in full headdress. He hopscotched and twirled the fancydancer’s stuttering steps.
Lavi’s voice wound around and through the odd textures of sound, her lyrics capturing the struggle of contemporary Indians trying to make peace with the modern world.
Somehow, the SongCatchers manage to make all the odd juxtapositions work. Even drummer Mike McDonald’s R&B chant during “Before, Now and After” and Mark Cardernas’ jazzy piano solo in “Successor in Rights” suited the group’s fluid textures.
Especially moving was the way the SongCatchers integrated the high, warbling chants of the White Eagle Singers into even their conventional songs. The sound is eerie and enchanting at once, and perhaps a little disconcerting for ears tuned to more conventional harmonies.
Too disconcerting for A&M Records, apparently; the label edited out the chanted middle section from “Before, Now and After” for the single and video releases.
There probably will be continued pressure to tone down the truly “Indian” parts of the show, but that would cost the SongCatchers the edge that made Saturday’s concert such a memorable affair. Besides, as the White Eagle Singers’ Arlie Neskahi said, rock ‘n’ roll is now part of the Indian tradition.
“I remember driving with my father on the reservation in New Mexico when I was little and listening to rock ‘n’ roll on the radio; this is one of the few times in my life when all my experiences come together, to bring us to what our elders talked about, becoming rainbow people.”
And rainbow people they were, with black men on bass and drums, a man named Cardenas on the keyboards, a Jewish woman singing the songs, and a group of Indian singers supplying the soul.