LAUREN GILGER: And now it’s time for a Tiny Desert Concert. And our next act is one you have probably heard of.
Phoenix Afrobeat Orchestra is one of the most popular, longest-running and biggest local bands. And we mean "biggest" in the most literal sense. There are 13 official members of the band.
And they are a force, from the powerful vocals of frontwoman Camille Sledge (of Sister Sledge heritage) — to their infectious polyrhythms — to a horn section that makes you want to dance. PAO, as their fans know them, is rooted in the Afrobeat tradition created by Fela Kuti but their lyrics have grappled with some of the most pressing issues facing our city since the era of SB1070 more than a decade ago.
The whole group took the stage at the Arizona Science Center’s Dorrance Dome recently to play us a few songs and get us all on our feet.
And after, I sat down with Sledge, as well as trumpet player and music director Aldy Montufar and multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Mitch Freedom to talk more about their music, their legacy and how they each got involved in this project to begin with.
Full conversation
CAMILLE SLEDGE: I had just had my first child and I just thought, “Oh well, I’m not going to be having time now that I’m a mom, I’m not going to have time to do this. So I’m just going to do backgrounds and I’ll just hang out in the background, see you guys at shows.”
And I went to one rehearsal, I already knew one of the songs that they were playing — it was one of my favorite Fela Kuti songs — and I kind of just winged it. I wasn’t trying to be on the mic, I just was playing around, and they were like, “We would like for you to be our lead singer.”
LAUREN GILGER: That’s all it took?
CAMILLE SLEDGE: And I’m like, “What?” I didn’t think, I didn’t think of that at all. No, I didn’t think of that at all. I was like, “William, I’m so sorry, I’m going to do it. I’m going to do it.” I love it, it was like one of thing that I felt like I was missing from my life.
LAUREN GILGER: Absolutely. What about you, Aldy? What are your memories of those kind of early days?
ALDY MONTUFAR: Very similar story. I just had a baby and I was like, “I’m about to be a dad, I don’t want to commit to anything.” So actually, I said “No, thank you.”
And then a year later like right around when my daughter was like 10-11 months old, I was like, “All right, I can do things now, I can do cool things now.” So then, I’ll come to a rehearsal and I’ll see how it is and I didn’t commit to anything, and I just showed up with my trumpet and immediately just immediately felt the vibe and and loved it and immediately stepped into like probably overstep with like, “Horns, you should be doing this, vocals, you should be doing this.”
LAUREN GILGER: Music director!
ALDY MONTUFAR: Yeah, and I was like, that’s my lane. So immediately I took that and there was no resistance to that, everybody was like, “Yeah, cool, love it, love it.” And yeah, by the end of that rehearsal I think it was the same thing like, “Would you consider being like music director because that’s what you do?”
And I was like, “Yeah, let me let me really really think about it before I commit.” And then by the next week I was like, “Cool, I’m in, let’s do it.”
[PHOENIX AFROBEAT ORCHESTRA BEGINS PLAYING “I SAID WHAT I SAID”]
LAUREN GILGER: OK, so let’s talk about Fela Kuti, let’s talk about Afrobeat music. There are rules to this genre, right?
CAMILLE SLEDGE: Are there?
ALDY MONTUFAR: I mean there’s norms, not necessarily rules, yeah.
MITCH FREEDOM: There’s an aesthetic that people hear and then they classify it as Afrobeat music, and a lot of that has to do with the syncopated drumming of Tony Allen, the horn heavy melodies that kind of like dominate the songs, horn players coming from African jazz and highlife music, found funk music of James Brown, and they were like, “That’s the energy. Like let’s take our sensibilities of this West African jazz music and speed it up a little bit, add some really cool syncopated drums and polyrhythms.”
And then, Fela Kuti himself was just such a personality and a leader, which is I think one thing that we found in Camille that made the project make sense.
[“I SAID WHAT I SAID” CONTINUES]
LAUREN GILGER: So, I mean that many people on stage has such a feeling, which we all just experienced, right? And is it like that for each of you? Like, you’ve done this for a long time, like we’re talking more than a decade of performances in this group. Does it still kind of hold that magic?
CAMILLE SLEDGE: Yes.
ALDY MONTUFAR: Every single time.
CAMILLE SLEDGE: Every single show.
MITCH FREEDOM: Definitely.
ALDY MONTUFAR: Yeah. I think that’s what keeps us doing it for so long because it’s it’s almost like a medicine for us, right, when when the world is coming down, we still have each other and the music to like escape from that sometimes.
MITCH FREEDOM: The experience, too. Like I came out playing in orchestras and symphonies and just like instant chills like the moment everybody is kind of interacting and there’s all of that interplay between the instruments. And so that kind of like sound and power behind what we’re doing I think gives everybody like this really cool high creatively.
CAMILLE SLEDGE: Yeah. I would also add that the political message is really what’s a core important part of this music as well. And we all were going through what Phoenix was giving us, right? In this city, there’s a lot of inequities and there’s a lot of social injustice. And being together at that time when a lot of this craziness has been going on.
LAUREN GILGER: This is SB 1070 era, right?
CAMILLE SLEDGE: Yeah. Since then, yeah. And we were able to make a message about it in our music, and make it so that it was — digestible, I’ll say.
LAUREN GILGER: That’s one of the things that’s interesting about Afrobeat music, right? Like it’s super upbeat, it’s super fun, everybody’s dancing, but it’s like if you listen to what people are saying, it’s pretty heavy sometimes, right?
ALDY MONTUFAR: Totally.
CAMILLE SLEDGE: It’s heavy lyrics and we had these different conversations at our rehearsals, and then we would start jamming on it: OK, this is a something we probably need to talk about. Let’s talk about it, but let’s try and make it sound like something funky.
[“I SAID WHAT I SAID” CONTINUES]
LAUREN GILGER: Camille, you’ve described this as like a trance. The way you talk about it is almost like it’s a like a spiritual practice. You feel that way?
CAMILLE SLEDGE: It is. Yeah, it is. It’s a moment where I think we ask people to go deep, we ask them to kind of internalize the lyrics but also internalize the music, internalize these sounds that you’re hearing, because a lot of it’s repetitive, and it’s very much something that you can you can really go inward, and I love that about this music.
That’s what drew me into listening to Afrobeat in the first place, was this really great rhythm beat, this music that you can just kind of dive into and lose yourself dancing, lose yourself thinking about what the words are saying.
And really, I wanted us to all do that for Phoenix, for this this area, for our local community. Like, what things are we going through here, in Phoenix? Think about that. And how can you help? Where do you fit in? You’re a part of it. You’re a part of this community.
So, we all kind of have these moments where when we’re writing songs, as well as when we’re playing them, that we can lose ourselves in that, and I think it’s really, really special.
[PHOENIX AFROBEAT ORCHESTRA INTRODUCES AND PLAYS “THE TIMES”]
LAUREN GILGER: I wonder this, like as you think about the purpose that you were talking about there, Camille, like that community aspect, where you’re trying to get people to think about this place and being a member of this community, and you’ve been doing it for so long. What do you think the impact of that can be? Like the the real impact of having played to that many people in this place with that message?
CAMILLE SLEDGE: I think it can move mountains. We have moments where we’ve led protest marches. We’ve had all kinds of politicians at our shows. We’ve had moments where we have led charges to change things in our social climate here in Phoenix and, and beyond. We’ve had moments where I feel really proud of us because we’ve moved a lot of mountains, and I think that that keeps us going.
[“THE TIMES” CONTINUES]
MITCH FREEDOM: Being able to draw a lot of people out based on our reputation.
ALDY MONTUFAR: We use it as this is our platform, right? This is the way that we get the message out.
CAMILLE SLEDGE: Music is a weapon, and we use it as such.
MITCH FREEDOM: And we extend that. We extend it to other organizations in our community, and bringing people together is the first part of it. I think letting organizations come and table and have conversations with our fans and make them their fans as well, I think is the key, like the goal for us in terms of uniting the community.
LAUREN GILGER: You’re a big voice, you have a big platform in the local scene here. When you talk about Phoenix and and the longevity of this group, like Phoenix has changed a ton in the 10-plus years you’ve been doing this, right? Thirteen years now?
What do you think about that and sort of the way that you maybe and this place have evolved over that time?
ALDY MONTUFAR: I think that Phoenix is, it’s, it’s weird because we can see all the changes, but we can also see how there are a lot of things that haven’t changed and how our message from a song that we wrote 10 years ago is still relevant and we can still sing about the same issues that we sang about a decade ago, and they still make sense to us, and we can still include that message in there.
So when it comes to progressiveness and seeing young people and young artists come up and doing cool things, I think that that has changed a lot. But also in the grand scheme of things, there’s a lot of work to be done and we can continue to to focus on that and continue to work on that.
LAUREN GILGER: Sounds like you are nowhere near done.
ALDY MONTUFAR: Exactly.
LAUREN GILGER: All right. Well, Camille, Mitch, Aldy, thank you so much for doing this. Appreciate it.
ALDY MONTUFAR AND MITCH FREEDOM: Thank you.
CAMILLE SLEDGE: Thank you, Lauren.
[“THE TIMES” CONTINUES]
LAUREN GILGER: This is our latest Tiny Desert Concert with Phoenix Afrobeat Orchestra. You can watch the video of their entire performance on our YouTube page and website. And trust me, you’ll want to watch this one under the stars in the dome. It was really cool. To check it out, head to theshow.kjzz.org.
