The Afro beat picks up July 13 with Nuits d'Afrique for 10 days, some 30 concerts and nearly 300 musicians from Africa, the Caribbean and Black America.
In the final segment the beat picked up, and the forest scenes flashed as if illuminated by lightning — or by disco strobe lights.
Powerfully built, with massive forearms, Sweat joined the exodus of Southern black men who hired on as grooms because the job paid a halfway-decent wage and beat picking cotton.
The band sometimes joined Oki with electric bass vamps and percussion, and in one song the beat picked up behind Oki's fingerpicking to sound like West African pop built around a different harp, the kora.
Keeping time with the music, he made sweeping circles, using oranges, reds and yellows when the tempo slowed and dipping his fingers into the purple as the beat picked up.
The show opens with the slow tattoo and desultory strum of Dylan's "What Good Am I?", the beat picked up by audience handclaps, swelling to cheers as the singer takes the stage, backlit in penumbral gloom in front of the pulpit.
Bill Lowe's bass trombone growls with the gruff humor of the early Ellington collaborator Tricky Sam Nanton, and, as the beat picks up and the two percussionists, Tomas Fujiwara and Chad Taylor, embroider freely around it, the guitarist Mary Halvorson, with her calmly stinging tones pitching in behind Lowe, delivers a jaunty yet crystalline solo of her own.
"Even in this world of electronic gadgetry, nothing can beat picking up a good book and being able to travel to foreign places, learn new languages, learn about new cultures, or get to know new people without ever having to leave our own homes".
This was not a time to hold back I told myself as I leapt into the fray, the heavy beat picking me up and sweeping me into the early hours of the morning via Dan Drastic's funky tunes in the Taverne and the superb Johnny D at Saalbach's converted school (sorry kids).
