Last weekend's packed First Avenue main-room set and the hipster-thronged Red Stag Block Party in northeast Minneapolis were among their favorite shows so far. However, the most telling performance for the 10 members of Black Market Brass in their unusually busy summer actually might have been last month's more milquetoast gig at Log Jam in Stillwater.
"Seeing a bunch of teenagers and other Stillwater people getting down to our kind of music was kind of mind-blowing," guitarist Hans Kruger said, admitting it took the band a few songs to win the crowd over.
Continued baritone sax player Cole Pulice, "Some shows, the people don't really know what to make of us at first. But they see us having a blast on stage, and I think that tells them we're all in this together to have a good time."
The Stillwater story hints at how an instrumental Afrobeat band somehow became a go-to favorite for the summer party scene in Minnesota — a group whose music is based around the psychedelic-sounding, rhythmically complex, relatively obscure jazz/funk/fusion sounds of late Nigerian revolutionary Fela Kuti and the rest of his Afrobeat music movement.
Among the other outdoor fests that Black Market Brass has played this year were the Roots, Rock & Deep Blues Festival, the Twin Cities Jazz Festival, Art-a-Whirl at Bauhaus and the Coup d'état Block Party. The band has one more next weekend, the Borough Block Party outside Borough restaurant in Minneapolis' North Loop on Sunday (scheduled set time: 1 p.m.).
Quipped the group's other guitarist, Mitch Sigurdson, "We just show up to every block party and ask if we're playing."
Also the guitarist in the popular soul-rock sextet Black Diet, Sigurdson posted a Craigslist ad three years ago that became the big bang for BMB, asking if any other Twin Cities musicians were interested in forming an Afrobeat-flavored band. "There were DJ nights and radios shows, but you couldn't really go hear this stuff played live anywhere in town," he recalled.
How a bunch of white, twenty- and thirty-something rock, jazz and soul musicians in Minnesota got into Afrobeat music in the first place is another surprise worth explaining.