The Martha’s Vineyard Chamber Music Society launched its concert season Sunday with a show that wove centuries of African, European and American musical traditions into a fiery new sound that had audience members on their feet.
“Nobody’s allowed to walk out of here without dancing,” said Balla Kouyate, co-leader of the Mike Block-Balla Kouyate Band, which played a high-energy afternoon set at the Martha’s Vineyard Performing Arts Center.
Mr. Block, a classically trained cellist, and Mr. Kouyate, who plays balafon (a West African xylophone with wooden keys and gourd resonators) are both music instructors at New England Conservatory in Boston. They also perform with the Grammy Award-winning Silkroad Ensemble, with whom they will be touring in November.
Collaborators since 2008, the two now lead a six-piece band with African percussionists Sekou Dembele and Idrissa Kone and American string players Luke Okerlund, on electric guitar, and Mike Rivard on electric bass and sintir (a Moroccan bass lute made from camel skin stretched over a carved log).
This mix of percussion and strings yields a sound both propulsive and rich in tone color, an ever-moving background for Mr. Kouyate’s powerful mallet work and Mr. Block’s singing cello.
The combined effect called to mind 20th-century Nigerian star Fela Kuti’s explosive band, if Mr. Kuti had played balafon with guitars instead of a horn section. At one point Sunday, more than half the audience was up and dancing.
An American resident born in Mali, Mr. Kouyate is the inheritor of an 800-year-old family tradition as a djeli, or griot, charged with preserving oral history through words and music. He translated the Mandinka-language title of one song as “No,” explaining it as a stand against slavery.
“I know sometimes, when we talk about slavery, all of us [aren’t] comfortable...but in reality, it does happen, right? So this was a way for us to let our people know how to say ‘no’ through music,” Mr. Kouyate said, before unleashing a storm of notes on his balafon.
Along with African traditional music — including a Moroccan piece adapted by Mr. Rivard, who also plays bass with the Boston Pops — the group played original compositions and some surprising arrangements.
Mr. Block sang lead on the English-language songs, including Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land — based on the melody from the Carter Family’s When the World’s On Fire — and new wave band Talking Heads’ lilting This Must be the Place (Naive Melody).
Reaching deeper into musical history, the group also played a lively Southern fiddle reel called Shove the Pig’s Foot a Little Further Into the Fire and Mr. Block sang Farewell to America, his setting of an 18th-century poem by enslaved West African Phillis Wheatley.
Winding up a tour that began in Oregon, the Block-Kouyate band had just enough time to play the Vineyard before going into a recording studio this week to start work on their first album, followed by the upcoming Silkroad Ensemble tour.
“This was the only time that we could actually book them,” said chamber music society president Kim Baumhofer, who told Sunday’s audience she first saw the group two years ago and has wanted to bring them to the Island ever since.
Next up, the chamber music society is bringing back cellist Guy Fishman and violinist Renee Hemsing, who played a memorable concert on early instruments last year at the First Congregational Church in West Tisbury. Mr. Fishman and Ms. Hemsing, baroque specialists who perform with the Handel and Haydn society in Boston, play the church again Oct. 18.
On Nov. 22, the society hosts the Cape Cod Chamber Quintet for a concert that’s scheduled to take place at Stillpoint, the emerging venue on State Road in West Tisbury.
The season then moves down-Island with a Feb. 8 performance at the Edgartown Library by Trio Eris, New England Conservatory’s resident piano trio, whose members are recent and upcoming graduates mentored by pianist and faculty member Vivian Hornik Weilerstein.
Tickets and more information: mvcms.org/events.html.
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