As Chico Mann, multi-instrumentalist Marcos Garcia crafts dance music for the thinking man. Founded firmly in the tradition of Afrobeat king Fela Kuti, he tinkers and toys with drum machines and Casio keyboards, lacing futuristic soundscapes with ancient polyrhythms and New Wave nostalgia.
“I’m an artist and my vocation is to expand on tradition,” he posits. “That’s where I’m coming from with Chico Mann. It’s a recontextualization of tradition, and by recontextualizing it, it creates a new form. It’s an ongoing musical conversation between Africa and the Americas and the African diaspora as it’s in conversation with European harmony. Add electronic elements and now it’s something different, but it’s still part of this larger conversation that’s been going on for 500 years.”
Born in New Jersey to Cuban parents, Garcia adds a pan-Latin groove to his 8-bit Afrobeat with Spanish chants and choruses. That bicultural background helped forge an instant connection with Afrobeat.
“The first time I heard Fela I knew that I had never heard that music, but it sounded so familiar to me,” he remembers. “There was an instant resonance because I love funk, I love Cuban music, I love jazz, and it’s all of those things.”
Garcia joined Antibalas as a guitarist in 2003, a band that’s helped the legend of Kuti grow from underground cult hero to the toast of Broadway. Chico Mann allows Garcia the freedom to reinvent and reimagine his music across mind and space.
“My original conception was to make an archival-sounding Afro-funk thing, imagining what Afrobeat would have sounded like with a drum machine in New York from 1978 through 1982 – in that early electronic window. It’s imagining things in a different context and then filtering them through my experience. That’s where I find my voice.”
This article appears in March 18 • 2011.
