Shabazz Palaces, making an impression

A man leaned in to talk to me while Seattle's Shabazz Palaces was on stage in a hot, sunny parking lot outside an Austin venue called The Music Gym. He was Christopher Weingarten, covering SXSW for Rolling Stone Magazine.

"Your badge says Seattle. What can you tell me about these guys?"

Having previously blogged about Shabazz a ton and declared its "Shabazz Palaces" and "Of Light" micro-albums the best Seattle music of any genre in 2009, I was only too happy to oblige. Of any Seattle act, Shabazz is what SXSW is made for, an insanely good musical entity hardly anybody outside its home knows about.

Weingarten was really feeling Shabazz's hiphop, said he liked the dub echo on MC Ishmael Butler Palaceer Lazaro's microphone (pictured right) and the amplified kalimba playing of back-up man Tendai Maraire (pictured left).

No surprise he was struck by the latter. When Butler Lazaro pecked at his MPC sampler/drum machine and Maraire played what most people know as an "African thumb piano" the sound was singular and mesmerizing.

As was made obvious by whoops and screams at Shabazz's only Seattle concert last January, the sparse combination of booms, cracks, and fuzzy wind chimes is a hell of a calling card. Hard and soft, simple and complicated, African and African-American. It sticks in people's heads.

Weingarten happened upon the concert by accident. He'd never heard of Shabazz Palaces. Lured in by nothing but music, moved to ask questions, and intrigued by my brief back-storytelling ("He's the Digable Planets guy," "40 years old, making the best music of his life," "Seattle's best hiphop, hands down," "A spiritual father to some of our best young rap"), after the set, he vowed to try and get Shabazz some coverage.

Just when everything about SXSW was starting to seem to me nothing more than a party (not that anything's wrong with a party), just when I was beginning to believe no act had a real chance of getting suddenly discovered and exposed on a much larger lever than before, just when I was beginning to chalk up the "tomorrow happens here" slogan to empty rhetoric...