Brian Slattery Photos
Meridian Brothers.
The Meridian Brothers were already driving hard on a cumbia when bandleader Eblis Álvarez, who had been contributing a rhythmic guitar pattern to the groove, suddenly wrenched an echoing clatter out of the instrument — a sound that people unfamiliar with Álvarez’s work might not have known a guitar could make. But very few people in Cafe Nine on Wednesday night seemed new to the Meridian Brothers, a Colombian band that has steadily made fans worldwide on the strength of its recorded output from Bogotá. With pandemic restrictions lifted, the band was now on tour in the U.S. for the first time in years, and at the club on State and Crown, there was a sense of floodgates opening.
The Meridian Brothers are the brainchild of composer and multi-instrumentalist Álvarez, who has made a career of combining the deep, irresistible rhythms from Colombia and elsewhere in Latin America with resolutely experimental music. The result is something like a party jam, something like a lab, something like a toy shop. The music is soaked in fun, though Álvarez’s mission, on another level, is serious: to preserve the traditional music of Colombia by bringing it straight into an imagined future. That combination of intentions gives the music the kind of weight that gets feet moving, and the rhythm grounds the band’s sonic experiments. The result is sweaty and heady, partaking of psychedelia but going higher and deeper. No wonder the band was one that Rick Omonte, a.k.a. Shaki Presents, had talked to for years in hopes of bringing the group to New Haven to play. On Wednesday night, it finally happened.
Leon City Sounds.
The night of music started off with a DJ set from Leon City Sounds, spinning a mix of cumbia and salsa sprinkled with other elements — essentially presenting the rhythmic elements and song structures from which the Meridian Brothers have drawn much of their sound for the past two decades. It was the right music for the hour, as Cafe Nine steadily filled with people. Musicians from several New Haven-area bands mingled with dancers as couples took to the floor to show their moves, and friends greeted friends with smiles and slaps to the back.
By the time the Meridian Brothers — Álvarez on vocals, guitar, and keyboards; Maria Valencia on saxophone, clarinet, percussion and synthesizers; Mauricio Ramirez on percussion; Cesar Quevedo on bass; and Alejandro Forero on electronics and synthesizers — took the stage, the crowd was thoroughly warmed up, the band ready to play. The group hit hard from its very first number, virtually forcing the audience, which had already moved to the front, to start dancing. Howls of delight filled the air as Álvarez, Valencia, and Forero began their sonic forays while Ramirez and Quevedo laid down some of the heaviest rhythms heard all year. The band could create a dense, swirling sound driven by layers of instruments and Álvarez even running his voice through a harmonizer.
When Valencia joined Ramirez in the percussion section and Álvarez switched from guitar to keyboard, the band could also be at its most hypnotically rhythmic and its most sonically adventurous at the same time. The band proved a general point, that people can love some pretty experimental music as long as they can dance to it. In the case of the Meridian Brothers, who are diabolically expert at putting those elements together, the rhythms and sounds amplified one another, creating a sound that was deeply earthy and somehow also soaring.
As the band neared the end of its set, the tempos got faster, the music even more urgent. “This is for the hard dancers,” Álvarez announced to introduce a salsa number. “Where are the hard dancers?” Sure enough, they appeared, misting the club’s air with sweat as they moved their feet. The band’s attempt to leave the stage after their final number — a transformative, tropicalia-soaked take on Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” — was thoroughly rejected, and the Meridian Brothers rewarded the audience’s intensity with two more numbers that finally let the dancers’ exhaustion triumph over their enthusiasm. People then staggered out of the club onto Crown Street to mingle, chat, mop their brow, or just take in the cooling night air. No one wanted to go home just yet.
