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Take a musical chill pill with Zohar |
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Jul 16, 2007 at 03:45 PM |
Did you know Borat has a brother who fronts a band named Zohar? Well not Borat exactly, but Sasha Baron Cohen, writer-actor-social provocateur who plays the fictional "nice" Kazakh journo, has a sibling named Erran with a musical bent.
In addition to bro Erran's soundtrack work on the Borat flick, he mixes electronica with Middle Eastern/North African globo-grooves, sampling and knob-twiddling with live organic musicians, in Zohar.
Zohar's hitting a few towns in the US of A in support of a new disc, Do You Have Any Faith? The mini-tour includes a joint at the Elbo Room club at Valencia and 17th in the heart of San Francisco tomorrow night (Tuesday, July 17). For those Chip Shots readers with a taste for dat funky globotronic thang who happen to be in S.F. for Semicon West and are in need of some proper chillaxin', you might want to check Monsieur Cohen and his fellow travelers.
I saw the Zoharian contingent at the Skirball Cultural Center in West L.A. a few summers ago (and yes, his bro Sasha was in da proverbial house, accompanied by gal pal and entourage, lower-case "e"). Wearing my music crit hat that night, I reviewed the show as part of a two-pronged piece for the LA Weekly. Here's an excerpt:
Zohar looked out over the family-friendly Skirball crowd to see great-grandmas nodding to the beat in the evening heat next to babes in the arms of swaying young moms. Kibbutzim hippies and middle-aged daddies bopped beatifically as sampled cantors and muezzins floated over slightly chilled riddims. Augmenting the spectral disembodied voices, live singer Zena Edwards brought a brooding neosoul intensity, her pleas for peace resonating wonderfully in the center’s cultural-bridge-building environs: “Let’s get up to get down for unity/An international family affair.†Still, Zohar’s one-off U.S. debut (they had to return to Jolly Olde afterward) never came as close to penetrating the veil of the unseen as their trance-laden recordings do.
Ms. Edwards won't be singing, but the other Cohen brother will still have a crackerjack band on hand. For any Semiconers with a taste for digitally enhanced unitary vibes who are still semiconscious later on Tuesday night, who want that bodyrockin' yet chillin' feelin', should come to the Elbo and see how all that microchip mayhem gets thrown down by Zohar.
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