Club Makumba

About

" Rock, jazz, Afrobeat and the blues’ Southern swagger’s love child "

There’s an apocryphal cliché that says writing about music is like dancing about architecture. Maybe there’s a grain of truth in that. Maybe it would be better just to, you know, actually dance. And if you’re listening to Club Makumba, that certainly feels like a compulsion. ‘DANCING AS AN ACT OF RESISTANCE!’ blares their own website. For some bands, this might seem like blasé triumphalism, but for this Portuguese four-piece – self-described as ‘a free, spontaneous, experimental and tribalist exercise‘ – it feels like the most natural statement in the world.

Some might describe this as world music, but they’d be wrong; it’s a far more heady, intoxicating brew. Blending rock motifs, jazz, North African rhythms, hints of blues, and the odd smattering of electronica, their music swoops and whirls, blowing by in a rush of excitement. Take the whirlwind, demented drums and general cacophony of ‘Danças‘, for example, or ‘Jimmy Habibi‘, which sounds like a cross between a jam band and the Rolling Stones in a Moroccan souk. Or the darkly menacing ‘Med Swing‘, which at its most ominous throws a saxophone into the mix just for fun.

All of those are from their 2022 self-titled album, and it’s not hard to see how they’ve wowed fans and delegates at festivals such as Womex and Eurosonic. Gets your limbs moving, innit? But there’s a noble goal here, too – to traverse musical worlds ‘without bias or borders‘ and, they say, ‘to bring down all the evils of the world‘. Now that’s something we can all dance for.