By Todd Lavoie
The name might not set your world on fire, but damn these guys are on to something good: Brooklyn’s Nation Beat will bring their one-in-a-billion blend of Brazilian Maracatu, Appalachian roots music, and New Orleans-style funk to the Elbo Room this Saturday, March 8. What – scared at the prospect of such brazen genre-colliding, are you? Ah, don’t be, sweet cheeks. By the time the night’s over, you’ll have long forgotten about silly little things like musical genre-pigeonholing. Honestly, why over-think when you can just follow your feet instead?
First, an explanation to the band’s name. In northeastern Brazil – the birthplace of the percussion-heavy Afro-Brazilian dance/performance style known as Maracatu – practitioners of the genre identify their ensembles with the word nação (“nation”), a reference to the African countries from where they (or their ancestors) originally came. Most groups in Recife – the epicenter of Maracatu – begin their names with the words “Maracatu Nação,” usually followed by some form of geographical reference.
Now, Nation Beat plays a variant of a traditional Maracatu known as “Maracatu de Baque Virado” – literally, “Maracatu of the Flipping Beat” (baque is “beat” in Portuguese). So, the band whittled down the name from these origins and translated it back to English rather than keeping it in Portuguese. What the moniker lacks in flow, it at least compensates for in cultural reverence.