Saturday, January 21, 2006

3rd Annual Late Night A Hit

By Blair Lovern

Some music will make you dance if you don't want to, but the KUMAASI African Ensemble will make you dance even if you can't.

DALLAS — How in the sweet name of Dale Chihuly all that colorful glass hanging high in the Dallas Museum of Art's Atrium Café didn’t vibrate off its hinges Friday night, crashing into a huge speckled mess down below, this spic-and-span-floor-loving reporter will never know.

The museum celebrated its 103rd birthday Friday with its third Late Nights season, featuring musical guests Brave Combo and the KUMAASI African Ensemble.

KUMAASI drummers, singers and dancers kicked things off, marching down about the entire corridor length of the DMA and into the café. Semiramis and other statuary tapped their toes, people and animals in the paintings started a hoedown, the whole scene looked like it was from an old black and white scary cartoon. Unless you were there, you simply could not believe what the hell was – OK, let’s just say that didn’t happen. But let’s also say that if for some reason the scientific and artistic communities ever decide to pool their resources for some ridiculous desire to try to get ancient statuary to tap their toes, KUMAASI is the band to experiment with first.

These folks are plenty fun and loud. In fact, Texas Gigs video ace, Alex Kanakis, leaned over to me at a table during the show and mouthed something along the lines of, “It’s kind of difficult to carry on a conversation right now.” For all this reporter knows, he could have said, “Half an hour ago I sawed down a 19th century Vanderbilt Console into bite-sized pieces and ate it.” This hard-of-hearing reporter had no idea and just smiled back assuming it was normal discourse.

KUMAASI African Ensemble at Late Night at the Dallas Museum of Art

When Brave Combo started their show there was only one guy on the dance floor, and he was doing a dance that cannot be properly described by the English language. A few songs later, hundreds, perhaps even four-digit-amounts of folks of all ages, colors and creeds erupted into the Chicken Dance. They danced on the steps, danced on the balcony overlook upstairs, danced in the line to get into the crowded atrium. You could feel the whole downstairs floor flutter. Every now and then you’d see a guy with a There’s-no-way-I’m-doing-a-Chicken-Dance look on his face, and five seconds later he’d fallen under Brave Combo’s spell.

(Er, yes, they played plenty of other non-Chicken Dance songs - just saying this was a palpable, entertainment turning point, and that if anyone in this great big universe is to play the Chicken Dance song, please, oh, please let it be no one other than Brave Combo.)

After a couple of hours both bands had turned the room into a sweaty heap. They granted permission for your brain to forget that a short while ago you may have been holding your wine glass with your pinky out in an art museum café, making you wish all musical nights could be this merry.

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