On the Road with Zap Mama
Greetings from Tampa. We're two shows into a 29 show tour with the amazing Zap Mama taking us across the US (and one show in Toronto). What a treat to start the tour in warm sunny Florida, far away from the bitter cold of Brooklyn. We'll be here for three more shows (West Palm Beach, Miami, and Orlando) before making our way back north via Atlanta, Richmond, Newport News, and DC, and then to some of the coldest parts of the US...
The tour has been unique in that we're collaborating with Zap Mama...we've learned some of their songs, and they've learned some of ours, and the bulk of the set features the twelve of us and four of them singing and making music together. In addition to Zap Mama's tunes, we're performing mostly new original material...songs composed by lead vocalist Amayo and Antibalas founder/baritone saxophonist Martín Perna. In the mix so far: "Action Time", "Hook and Crook", and "Tombstown". We're also doing a trademark Antibalas arrangement of the 1984 Rockwell/Michael Jackson jam "Somebody's Watching Me" which seemed like a silly paranoid fantasy at the time it hit the radio, but now 30 years later has proven to be prophetic. Audiences are loving it in the way that you can love a song that tells the bitter truth about a sad, absurd reality.
Zap Mama is amazing and it has been a pleasure working with them. After seventeen years of Antibalas being an all-male band, their presence has created a refreshing and necessary equilibrium of yin and yang energy onstage. They are consummate professionals, excellent vocal performers, great dancers, sharp dressers (we've had to really step up our clothing game) and all-around nice people. It's been a family vibe with Marie and Lene each bringing their children out for the first leg of the tour.
We'll be posting some live recordings on our Soundcloud page (and mirrored here) as well as photos and video of the tour. You can follow it virtually, but nothing will come close to the experience of seeing this rare collaboration live in person.
Stay tuned.
Three Questions with drummer Miles Arntzen
What creative things do you have going on right now?
I've been working on the EMEFE album for the past year. It is finally done, and now we are scheming how to release it and building up our live show. (We recently put up one of the tracks on Soundcloud as a teaser.) Not only is the album is a true representation of all of my influences, but it is also the debut of myself as a lead singer, which is a role I've been quietly working on for years now. I am writing, recording and preparing a bunch of other music to release around the same time as the EMEFE album, to further present myself as a songwriter and producer, not just a drummer.
What was your favorite Antibalas show/moment of the past few months?
Antibalas as a band creates truly unbelievable moments regularly. I was going to write about our experience playing "Bridge Over Troubled Water" behind Judy Collins at the Paul Simon Tribute earlier this year, which was so incredibly uplifting... but then I would've forgotten our experience jumping onstage to sing/play "Wake Up" with Arcade Fire in a Castle in Verona. What?!
What do you most worry about and what are you doing about it?
I worry about the fact that the music industry seems impossible to break through unless you pay your way to the top (or experience what is basically a miracle). It is easy to let this mentality bring you down, but I also believe that good music prevails! So what am I doing about it? Writing music, making music, living music... all the time.
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