Brian Slattery Photo
“Thank you! We are Tal National, from Niger,” said Almeida, the band’s guitarist, from the Cafe Nine stage. “Can anyone tell me — where is Niger?”
There was a second of awkward silence. Then someone from the audience yelled, “West Africa!”
Almeida took a breath. “Finally!” he said. “Thank you. Thank you very much.”
Tal National has been touring relentlessly for well over a decade with an intricate, hard-driven, and totally infectious music. Through OddBall Entertainment, it made Cafe Nine one of its North American stops on Wednesday night — and turned the place into the hottest dance club in town.
Cafe Nine had prepared by moving all the tables from the front of the stage. The floor was full by the time the Mountain Movers took the stage to warm up the crowd.
Tal National — on Wednesday, featuring Almeida on guitar, Yac Tal on bass, Omar on drums, Keligue on talking drum, Massaoudou and Souleymane on vocals, and Elize as dancer — started slow, with a deep, rolling rhythm that immediately got the people standing in front of the stage moving. They did a couple numbers that way, until Almeida asked the crowd if it wanted to get a little crazy.
It did.
So Almeida explained that a particular song they played was designed to possess the singer, to drive him crazy. Massaoudou more than obliged. As the band picked up its tempo, Massaoudou’s singing changed, thrillingly, until the sounds coming from his throat seemed more animal than human. He jumped into the crowd and ran from person to person, engaging them, delighting them, as the music got more and more frenzied.
That was the hook. By the time the song was over, almost nobody in the place was sitting down, and everyone was packed as close to the stage as they could get. Which was when Tal National kicked it into high gear. At its peak, fully half the band was dancing with the crowd while the band delivered a song that somehow both jumped and pounded.
The band danced as they played on the stage, too, moving backward and forward again as a unit and never missing a single one of the beats that Omar and Keligue laid down from their drums, playing with astonishing strength, speed, and stamina.
Tal National was a band playing at the top of its game, to an audience that couldn’t get enough.
“One more?” Almeida asked.
“Two more!” said someone from the crowd.
“Three more!” said someone else.
“OK, two more,” Almeida said.
On the last one, riding a groove that kept everyone dancing all the way to the end, the band’s members left the stage one by one — almost unnoticeably at first — until it was clear that the singers and dancer were gone, the talking drum was gone. Yac Tal, who had been playing muscular lines all night on the bass, dropped out. Only Almeida and Omar were left, Omar driving the beat as hard as ever.
Almeida put down his guitar and walked over to Omar. As Omar kept playing, he took away each piece of the kit, one at a time. First the cymbals and the toms, which Omar had never needed much anyway. Then he took away the hi-hat, leaving Omar with just the snare and drums. Then he took away the snare, leaving Omar playing the rim of the bass drum and nothing else. It was still enough to dance to. Until Almeida picked up the bass drum at last.
The audience exploded in applause, and the band came back to the stage for a final bow. Everyone in Tal National was smiling. Everyone in the room smiled back.
