by SCOTT C

It’s been four years since guitarist and composer Gabriel Aldama first decided to pursue the Afrobeat project that has grown into eight-piece band Afrodizz. Along with an EP released on U.K. label Freestyle Records, they’ve brought their spirited live show not only to many stages across Canada, but to a few lucky places in Europe and the U.K as well. With the release of their second effort, Froots, Afrodizz are showing all of the signs of becoming a major Quebecois export, able to easily hold their own among the internationally known masters of Afrobeat, while bringing their own influences and interpretations to the front. The Mirror spoke to Aldama, fresh from a short Canadian tour and ready for their free, outdoor Nuits d’Afrique appearance.

Mirror: So it’s been a busy summer for you guys!

Gabriel Aldama: Yes, it has.

M: Where did your most recent Canadian tour take you?

GA: We started in London Ontario, then Winnipeg, and on to five shows in Vancouver.

M: Five shows!?

GA: Yep. In 11 days we did something like 10 shows. We were very busy. I didn’t know that Canada had so many hippies (laughs).

M: Yeah. There’s lots of those.

GA: For sure, but all of the festivals that we played at had thousands and thousands of people, but very little garbage anywhere. The way they work is very ecological. When we were in Winnipeg, there were so many people, but no garbage. Everybody was very clean and very cool.

M: This is at the Winnipeg Folk Festival?

GA: Yep.

M: That’s a very eclectic festival.

GA: Yeah. We did three shows at this place, but the main show we did was at one o’clock in the morning, on the site where people were camping, so it was way out in the middle of nowhere, with thousands of people around us dancing hippie-style, but a very interesting time.

M: This is where your eyes were opened to the hippies?

GA: Oh, yeah. All that Afrodizz wants to do is to make people dance, and it doesn’t matter if you’re a hippie or punk, that’s all you want to do in the end. Sometimes I felt like some of our new songs felt more modern than a lot of the other bands that were there. Everybody enjoyed all of the music, but it felt like our rhythms were more accessible to the people that were there.

Leaving the Shrine

M: As the guy who is largely responsible for the writing on the new album, how would you describe the difference between this record and your last EP?

GA: The most important thing on this album was to go outside of the sound of Afrobeat that I’ve been hearing for the last two or three years. A lot of bands are coming to Afrobeat and doing Fela Kuti, like we did on the first album. Kif Kif was school for us, but we wanted to put all the influences of what we’re listening to into this album, and not end up doing Fela all over again. We want people to say, “This is Afrodizz, and it’s not the same kind of Afrobeat as any other band.” We also wanted to do an album that was more rough, less hippie-style (laughs). Some of the songs are happy, but we have darker songs on this record as well, a little bit more serious. This is a really constructed album, and I spent a lot of time with Vance [Payne], the vocalist, to have direction in the melody and the voice. The other record was more jamming and hypnotic, but here each song is something different.

M: How did that great collaboration with Deweare come about? You really nailed the Serge Gainsbourg feel.

GA: I’ve been playing guitar with Deweare for about a year, and “Fashion Terrorist” was the first song we wrote for this album. But, from the beginning to the end of the record, we didn’t have any lyrics for the song, so we called Deweare and asked him if he wanted to try something. It took him one week to come up with something, and the idea of Gainsbourg was really interesting to us.

M: It’s perfect, man. It’s a really great song.

GA: We were almost going to make the song instrumental, so it was really great that he brought something new to the song, both in the way it sounds, and the political side of it.

At Place Émelie-Gamelin on Saturday, July 22, 6:30 p.m., free

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