Daniel Shoemaker Photos
“Best Video is my best place.” remarked Guinea-born guitarist and longtime New Haven resident Mamady Kouyate, who on Friday returned with his band, the Mandingo Ambassadors, to perform at Best Video Film and Cultural Center for the second time in under a year.
Kouyate, mirroring the current instrumental permutation of his Mande jazz group, was a man of few words as the much-lauded New York- and New Haven-based collective packed the familiar space with reveling onlookers, held rapt by the irresistible sway of the group’s propulsive thrum.
The noted lack of vocals was not the only perceptible shift in the band’s lineup since its previous performance at Best Video in March of last year. At the time Kouyate intimated that he would return with an altered lineup, dangling a possible horn section as enticement (a promise he followed through on in a later show). The particular incarnation of the group on Friday was considerably more familial. Seated one next to the other, the band — stretching along the back wall from Cult Classics to Auteurs — was bookended by two of Kouyate’s blood relations, two more shining beacons emanating from the rich musical history of the legendary Kouyate family. Its lineage that stretches back through hundreds of years of West African griot tradition and currently spans the globe. What the name Diabate is to Malian music, so Kouyate is to Guinean music.
Flanking Mamady Kouyate immediately to his right, Ousmane Kouyate was introduced by the virtuoso as his “brother and the person who taught me to play the guitar.” Ousmane, prolific in his own right, has released numerous solo albums under his own name and helmed the renowned ensemble Les Ambassadors Internationeaux, a similarly energetic Mande jazz group that rivals Mandingo’s polyrhythmic interplay in density and danceability.
At the opposite end of the makeshift stage sat a young djembe player whose playing could only be observed as an indistinguishable cloud of furiously flying fingers anchoring the collective’s kaleidoscopically complex grooves and rat-a-tat-ing through reality-defying solos. This prodigious percussionist was local drum hero Seny Camara.
Rounding out the night’s line up was long-time collaborator and co-guitarist Mamady Kouroura, bassist “The Professor” Michael Veal, Drummer Andy Algire, and local percussionist Jocelyn Pleasant holding down the congas. Notably, aside from Mamady Kouyate, Kouroura and Pleasant were the only veterans of last year’s show who returned for this weekend’s encore performance.
Feeling more like a community living room than an international music venue, Best Video provided a cozy setting for the evening’s musical guests. So blurred were the usual lines of formality that there was scarcely a divide between the soundcheck and set, save for a few gradually downturned dimmers. In this regard the comfort of audience member and performer alike seemed paramount.
Guitarists, mirroring their audience, sat casual and cross-legged as they shredded through shimmering runs and ping-ponging, echo-inflected arpeggios. Undergirding the comfortably compounded interplay of the three guitarists were basslines simultaneously seismic and sturdy, bronco-bucked grooves that refused to lose grip as the trio of percussionists leaned into the precariously controlled chaos.
The audience, dense and intently observant, found their folding-chair fidgets gradually growing and coalescing into unselfconscious eruptions of shared joy. Connections formed in the scant and sacred spaces between seats, selves and somewhere else.
