Live at the Belly Up: Beats Antique (Belly Up Tavern, KPBS-TV, 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After that Charles and I watched an episode of Live at the Belly Up on KPBS -- the Belly Up Tavern being a long-established live-music venue in Solana Beach (though I have no idea how they’re weathering the storms of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic) that already existed when I moved to San Diego in 1980, though due to my usual transportation issues (I don’t drive) I’ve never actually been to, so I’m grateful to KPBS for filming shows there and airing them as a regular series. (The one last night was copyrighted 2018.) The act on last night’s show was Beats Antique, a bizarrely eclectic ensemble of three or more musicians and three female dancers -- though the Wikipedia page on them, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beats_Antique, lists only three permanent members: multi-instrumentalist David Satori, drummer Tommy “Sidecar” Cappel (who was the spokesperson for them on the brief interview segments between some of the songs) and dancer Zoe Jakes. (The Wikipedia page says Satori and Jakes began “dating” in 2007, the year Beats Antique was formed, but does not say whether or not they are still an off-stage couple.)

Beats Antique was formed under the sponsorship of Miles Copeland, brother of former Police drummer Stewart Copeland, apparently at first just to provide recorded accompaniments for Jakes’ dances. But they soon became a live performance act as well, drawing from the San Francisco Bay Area tradition of street festivals (Beats Antique are based in the East Bay city of Oakland, also the home town of Democratic vice-presidential nominee Kamala Harris) as well as Satori’s experience playing with street bands in Nigeria and other West African countries and Jakes’ training as a belly dancer. There were actually three musicians and three dancers in Beats Antique’s Belly Up performance -- drummer Cappel, a musician who played electric banjo (though it was a flat-bodied instrument and didn’t sound all that different from an electric guitar) and doubled on electric violin, and a reed player who doubled on clarinet (though he played it so high that at first it sounded like an oboe) and baritone saxophone -- though his sax sounded less like a jazz musician’s and more like Dana Colley, who gave a unique sonic texture to the early 1990’s band Morphine.

The most obvious influence on the music of Beats Antique was Middle Eastern, but both their music and their highly visual performance-art act drew extensively on other sources as well. Cappel insisted in his interviews that the band combined live performance and D.J. culture -- though rather than actually mixing live they rely on carefully produced studio recordings (Beats Antique has released no fewer than 11 albums, all on Miles Copeland’s CIA Records label -- so called, by the way, because Miles and Stewart Copeland’s father was actually a major officer in the Central Intelligence Agency) from which they accompany themselves in live performance, deleting from the recordings the instruments they’re going to play live. In previous Live at the Belly Up shows I’ve often counted the number of separate songs the band performs in their allotted 55 minutes to indicate how improvisational they are -- usually the fewer songs, the freer the band’s performance -- but that metric definitely does not apply to Beats Antique. The band ostensibly performed 13 songs on this show -- “I Got,” “Killer Bee,” “Semblance,” “Oriental Uno,” “Three Sisters,” “Dope Crunk,” “Vapor Star,” “Vendetta,” “Battle,” “Daze,” “Crush,” “Bombay Beats,” and “Egyptic” -- but a lot of them blended into each other. The way the band blends recorded and live performances allows them to present guest stars they’ve recorded with in other cities and countries, like vocalist Tatiana Karakova in Ukraine and sarod player (the sarod is a less jangly cousin of the sitar) Alam Khan from India, even though they’re not present.

Beats Antique is a unique group that scores with the sheer theatricality of their presentation -- the musicians, the dancers, the light show (my husband Charles said they were one of the few groups that actually benefited from a light show instead of putting one on just because audiences expect one). Mostly Zoe and her fellow dancers wore more or less traditional belly-dancing costumes (which no doubt got a charge from the straight guys in the audience!), but there were other elements, especially when Zoe wore one of those harnesses that carries a bass drum so it can be used in a marching band and on one number, “Killer Bee,” Zoe and the two other dancers wielded pom-poms and looked so much like a spaced-out version of a cheerleader squad I joked, “Now we know where all those killer cheerleaders from Lifetime ended up!” About the only thing I would fault Beats Antique for is that, despite the wide variety of instruments they use and sounds they achieve with them, the songs are still mostly in mid-tempi and started to blend together after a while. A few softer, subtler tracks that would have allowed Zoe and the other dancers to do more balletic moves would have been a nice change of pace. But still this was a really fun group, well worth seeing and a delightful change from the norms of small-club musical performance!