The Telluride Blog

Last week we spoke with Luke Quaranta of Toubab Krewe about the band, their musical inspirations, and their upcoming show at the Fly Me to the Moon Saloon this Saturday night, March 30^th! Toubab Krewe has been touring throughout the world since 2005, playing music in a blend of global styles they describe as a “sonic Pangaea.”

T.com: We’re really excited to have you guys play at the saloon can’t wait to have you in Telluride! I just wanted to ask you a couple questions before we see you play. Tell me about your band name id love to hear the story about how that came to be.

LQ: You know what, Toubab Krewe… we’ve spent a lot of time in West Africa over the years, started traveling there as college students in 1999. I went for the first time to Guinea. And then a few of us, a couple years after graduation went to the Ivory Coast right after graduation, studying music.

Throughout West Africa, Toubab or Toubabou is a way to describe foreigners, people not born of continental African descent. We got used to hearing it…even well before we started the band, we would refer to ourselves as the Toubab crew, this group of friends that would go back and forth to West Africa and had this real passion for the music.

It was funny, when we started the band we were trying to come up with a band name and it was almost, well, we were the Toubab Krewe. We chose the New Orleans spelling of “krewe” as a nod to New Orleans as a place where different musical types and genres from around the world and people from around the world came together and from that, indigenous American musical styles were born.

I think it really speaks to our music; it’s really this coming together of different musical styles from a lot of different places. When we started the band it was really specific West African music coming together with rock and some North Carolina styles… and it was kind of appropriate to what we were doing musically. The Toubabou part was us really claiming and owning who we are as Americans but at the same time defining ourselves by what we are not… what we were doing was somewhere between worlds.

T.com: I know you guys are from Asheville. From my own experience with your shows, I can hear the Americana influence and obviously the heavy West African sounds. Just curious, what are your greatest musical influences - personally, and as the band as a whole?

LQ: Really everyone in the group grew up in families that loved music. I grew up listening to a lot of classic rock, and soul music, so you know, everything from Led Zeppelin to all the Motown stuff, to Robert Johnson and Aretha, Marvin Gaye, Allman Brothers... as a young teenager I got really heavy into hip hop. Kind of in the middle of the golden era of New York hip hop, so Biggie, Naz, Jay, all kinds of artists from around that time. And I think as a group, especially for a few of our members, growing up in western North Carolina they grew up around a lot of Appalachian tradition and traditional music, string and old time music, and that’s really become part of our sound over the past few years. It really continues. It’s been a real process of discovery as we’ve been a band, starting in the West African tradition, and it’s been a process of continuing to discover music from New Orleans, East Africa, Ethiopian music, Indian music, South American music and styles from Peru and the Andes region and Mexican music. Its kind of an ongoing, never-ending process of discovering and being inspired by music which kind of finds its way into what we do.

T.com: What do you think inspires you guys, having grown up in the US, to explore so deeply into other cultures? I think it’s a really unique feature of your music is the exploratory sound. Not a lot of bands are doing what you do, especially ones on the festival circuits and the bands we see a lot out here in Colorado.

LQ: It’s definitely like a case of kindred spirits… in terms of the guys [in the band], we came together over a love of music and an openness and curiosity in general. Also I think, musicians have somewhat been ahead of the curve or ahead of mainstream culture in terms of making connections across borders and finding ways that we’re more similar than we are different. Music is such an ethereal thing; music is different in terms of the other arts. It exists in this ethereal space. It can’t be seen, it can be heard and digested in a way, but it’s much more fluid than that. I think because of that, music has always brought people together across cultural lines. There’s a lot of common ground in music… in the ways musicians express themselves in ways that are very similar. We’re all kind of attracted to that. We’ve always been interested in discovery and music and West Africa just grabbed a hold of us…. Now we’ve just been doing it for so long it feels natural. 

T.com: How is playing a small, intimate venue like the moon, how does that differ from your festival shows? Or the festivals you’ve played in West Africa?

LQ: It’s interesting. From when we first got together, we’ve always said 10 or 10,000… we’re bringing the same vibe. It’s almost kind of a goal to play the same way, to feel the same way, the same connections with each other as musicians and with the crowd in front of 10 or 15,000. To not to over reach or over play… in front of 10, to try to project the same kind of energy you would in front of 15,000: trying to bring the same energy to the experience… I think you still have to bridge that gap. You still have to bring the audience in and create this communal experience.

Maybe it’s from all our time spent in West Africa and our affinity for traditional music, but our experience playing music is as much a shared experience with the audience as it is a performance… we’re more about the shared experience where the energy from the audience informs what’s happening. 

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We can’t wait to hear Toubab Krewe play the Fly Me To The Moon Saloon on Saturday night! Proceeds from every ticket go toward building a music school in Mali, one of the band’s most important projects. Here’s a link to learn more about this program. 

Additionally, you can vote for Toubab Krewe in a competition through Brita water filters for the group to receive reusable water bottles, carbon offset credits, and a retrofit of their tour bus for biodiesel. Vote for Toubab Krewe at this link and help the band pursue sustainable touring practices and eliminate disposable water bottles from their tour!

Today we spoke with Galen Disston, vocalist for Pickwick, an up-and-coming garage R&B band out of Seattle. They played the main stage at Blues & Brews in 2012 and return to Telluride tomorrow to the Sheridan Opera House. Since their Telluride debut last year, Pickwick has released a new album, “Can’t Talk Medicine,” rocked the western festival circuit and has sold out shows across the country. Don’t miss what is sure to be an incredible show Wednesday March 20^th, at the Sheridan Opera House. The show starts at 8 PM! Tickets here.

T.com: We are really excited to have you guys coming into town tomorrow and seeing you play at the Opera House in that intimate venue – have you been before?

It’s this great historic venue right in the middle of downtown, celebrating its 100^th year this year, has some great energy and great acoustics, it should be awesome.

GD: All we’ve seen is at the Fly Me To The Moon and the main stage at the Blues & Brews Festival.

T.com: how do you think you play better as a band - in the larger, festival circuit venues or at a smaller, more intimate venue?

GD: We’ve definitely had some great experiences at both; we definitely feel more comfortable and prefer playing smaller clubs where we can really interact with people and people can get closer to us. People can feed off that energy.

T.com: Your new album just came out on the 12^th, I think it’s awesome. I’d love to hear about how it all came together, your influences for the record, and maybe a self-description of how you’d characterize the sound.

GD: The record was a long time coming, the sessions that make up Can’t Talk Medicine kind of unofficially started in December 2011, but the sessions actually on the record came from April 2011 on. We all work full-time jobs, we were touring in between when we could… it took a little bit longer than we would have liked. We also were doing it on our own so we wanted to be able to put something out that we felt comfortable with and were proud of. We didn’t want to put it out before it was ready.

One of the things that’s unique about our record, it was recorded in our house. It’s not an ideal environment. We recorded the drums in our carpeted living room, which isn’t recommended; we recorded the backup vocals in the kitchen. It was all done in the headquarters of the house, where we practice and write songs - and that’s all done in the basement, and all of our meetings and planning happens in the kitchen and the living room. It really is a center for everything we do as a band. 

One thing I thought that was cool, one of our roommates… collects cassette tapes from thrift store answering machines and organizes and compiles all the found audio that he finds, that’s where all the talking clips and found audio that’s on the record comes from. It was cool that that found its way onto the record, too. It’s all part of the character of the house that made up the way the record sounds.

In terms of our influences, I don’t want to speak for everybody because… we all listen to a lot of different stuff… we love a lot of sixties bands like the Spencer Davis Group or the Sonics from Tacoma. We like the Walkmen, I was listening to a lot of Notorious B.I.G. toward the end of the record. It’s hard to kind of pin down what led to each thing, but it’s all kind of in there.

I think our sound gets described incorrectly as neo-soul a lot of the time, and I really think neo-soul is adventurous, kind of trippy soul music from the nineties, like D’angelo and Erykah Badu, which is like amazing music that we can’t touch. I think we’re really more of a rock band that borrows from soulful influences. At the same time were all really interested in garage rock too, like the Black Keyes or a band from the sixties called the Monks or the Sonics from Washington. I think we borrow as much from those early garage rock influences as from soul music.

T.com: It’s always interesting to get the band’s own perspective on their music!

GD: Garage-soul or garage R&B is a lot closer than neo-soul.

T.com: Which instrument do you play Galen?

GD: I sing.

T.com: Wonderful, the instrument of the voice. Any personal influences you’d like to share besides the ones you’ve already mentioned?

GD: I love bob Dylan.

T.com: Have you played any of the songs off this new record on tour prior to its release last week?

GD: Yeah we’ve been playing some of the songs for a while, but this is kind of the set list we’ve planned for this tour, which includes some new songs that aren’t on this record. Yeah the tour’s been great, San Francisco sold out! We were really surprised that tons of people came out to Phoenix and Albuquerque, we’ve never been to those cities. This Monday in Aspen was awesome, we had 200 people. We’ve been very encouraged by this early touring. In April we’re going out to the east coast and Canada which is also our first time, our manager said some of the venues are close to selling out, so that’s unbelieveable.

T.com: Good to hear! We’re super excited to have you out here in Telluride at the Opera House.

GD: We really appreciate any support and we had a great time at the festival. We would love to meet any people who have any idea who we are at the show! 

T.com: Looking forward to it!