Lucy Gellman
Jain.
“We heard New Haven knows how to get down!,” cried Sunny Jain from the top of the New Haven Green, where he and members of Brooklyn-based Red Baraat had taken the Arts & Ideas main stage just twenty minutes earlier. Droplets of sweat had started forming on his neck early into the cool evening; now they ran in rivers, glistening against his damp shirt. “Does New Haven really know how to get down?”
A cheer went up from the crowd, arms rising with 200-some voices. Kids were lifted onto shoulders. Bands of friends came together, bodies hugging and laughing against the sun’s lazy descent. Close to the stage, dancers had already kicked up a cloud of brown dust where the Green’s grass had disappeared. Jain raised his right arm, and struck his double-headed dhol with a resounding, clean bang. Hundreds of bodies lurched forward, untethered once more.
Formed in 2008 by frontman Jain, Red Baraat rocked the New Haven Green Sunday night as part of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, now in its second week in the city. For attendees old and young alike, one thing remained readily apparent from the band’s first number to its last: This was a group of musicians who had promised a party and brought one, filling the Green with infectious and unerringly danceable sound.
That’s partly because Red Baraat, who performed for Pakistani powerhouse Noori in 2012, has figured out an organizational system and accompanying soundscape that is as new and mesmeric as it is airtight. “I can’t believe no one did this before,” said Ravi Krishnaswami, Hamden-based member of Smiths tribute band The Sons & Heirs who had come to the event.
He was right on: the band’s eight members offer a blend of bhangra and bayou, where brassy funk rises up to kiss Punjab folkways, whispered suggestions of Parsi theatre, enveloping, dizzy jazz melodies and rhapsodic percussion. But it doesn’t stop there. Members — Jain on dohl and ocean-spanning vocals, Rohin Khemani on percussion, Chris Eddleton on drumset, Jonathan Goldberger on guitar, Jonathon Haffner on soprano sax, Sonny Singh on trumpet, Ernest Stuart on trombone, and John Altieri on sousaphone — seem to have traveled to the outermost musical reaches of what their instruments can do, and then come back to a sort of musical ground zero to report on what they’ve found.
Pieces like their infinitely good “Shruggy Ji” and “Gaadi of Truth,” with which they closed, personify this, shrugging any sort of label to offer an aural trip halfway around the world that makes pit stops in New York, East St. Louis, and New Orleans. Sunday night, Khemani, Eddleton, and Jain were so tight that they could be playing the same percussion in different variations, and then at different tempos. Altieri dropped a sousaphone solo mid-set that had the crowd stupefied, then ecstatic. Singh got the crowd jump-jump-jumping like the spirit of Kris Kross had walked onto a Bollywood set, and decided to stay for a little while. There was no option but to dance like whole lives depended on it.
Members of the crowd in motion.
And the crowd did. Like, they really did, breaking out into over 100 different physical, joyful interpretations of the same song and coming together as the band does each time they perform, a hundred distinct strains of something spinning song into community. As the first beat dropped, Nimmi Sharma grabbed her young daughter’s hands and got grooving. Couples awkwardly couple-danced. New Havener Tessa Skiparis threw a hula-hoop over her neck, began hooping, and then ceded the dirt-covered dance floor to a three-year-old who wanted to try it out. No one was inhibited. No one needed to be. Even passers-by crossing through the Green stayed for a song or two, and had a little spring in their step when they left.
Monday morning, after all, was an afterthought. Their only job was to move for as long and hard as they could.
I'm a late middle-aged Irish-American and largely clueless when it comes to world music. Lucy is right - this was a great concert.