Since 2006, the reggae-funk-jam collective Buru Style has been a staple of great music on and off campus. They’re known for their incredible shows, from opening for State Radio to playing packed, sweaty dance marathons at BuHo. In May, Buru Style released their newest recordings featuring Haiti-by-way-of Boston vocalist Ajahni. The Argus sat down with trumpeter Jake Schofield ’12 and drummer and bandleader Bill Carbone, a PhD student in ethnomusicology, to hear about Buru past, present, and future.

 

Argus: How did the Buru Style come to be?

Bill Carbone: I think it was in the fall of ’06. I had just started grad school here and I linked up with Miles Turner who was at that point a junior here, a bass player. We played a party over on Lawn, you know, where the grad students live. It was supposed to be bass, sax and drums—it was at Kyle Brender’s house, he was a grad student. But he got food poisoning right before the gig, so actually there was a guy with a laptop who was playing with us. So it ended up just being drums, bass, and laptop. We were like, what do we do? Should we just play? We just decided to play and we ended up having a really good time. We played for three and a half hours or something. People seemed to really like it, it was just drum and bass grooves and a laptop. So then we just did it more. We originally played all Nyabinghi Reggae music, which I was writing about for my dissertation. That year, we epically won the battle of the bands—it was a big victory. We played instrumental dub music and beat out four bands with singers to win the battle of the bands and got to open for TV on the Radio. Yeah, so, pretty cool.

 

A: Where does your name come from?

BC: It’s a Skatalites song. The reason the Skatalites used the name is that Buru is a kind of drumming that their rhythms were all based on. So when we started playing we were doing all music from that tradition. Nyabinghi is the Rastafarian hand drumming but they took it from Buru, which is the almost extinct kind in Jamaica. They literally just took it and called it Nyabinghi. So the Skatalites had a song using that rhythm called Buru Style and then we were playing like 20 songs using that rhythm, so I was like, Buru Style. It works. It had a nice ring to it.

 

A: What is your favorite Wes venue to play?

Jake Schofield: Buddhist House is a reliable venue. Outdoor shows are pretty epic, but I think BuHo is my favorite.

BC: Yeah, on a consistent basis, definitely Buddhist House. It’s always so awesome when we play there. Over the years there have been shows there that were packed to the point where it was kind of stupid. I remember one Halloween when people were so wasted and so many people showed up that it was almost not that awesome. Then there was a year when we did a holiday concert and we did dub versions of holiday music. There were maybe like 30 people, but that was one of my favorite ones ever. As a room, it works for everything. It can be a total rager or just kind of a concert. My second favorite would be the backyards of Fountain. Did you hear about the riot [in 2008, when Middletown Police unleashed dogs and tear gas on students]? We were like, totally pivotal in the riot. We were playing a big show in a backyard that swelled, and though it’s not like we started it, we were one of the attractions that night in the back of Fountain. When they broke up our concert they just sent everybody into the street.

 

A: So you guys worked with a vocalist on your last album. How was that experience?

BC: It’s pretty cool. It’s like a whole other can of worms. We’ve worked with a lot of vocalists through the years, for a long time we backed the guy Toussaint [the Liberator], and then, when the band first started I would bring in different vocalists all the time from Boston, people who I knew, some Caribbean and non-Caribbean people. When we don’t play with a vocalist, it’s not a free for all, but it’s much more of an ethereal, musical odyssey kind of experience. When we play for a vocalist, we play songs. Everyone has to really reel it in, cause it’s about the singer and the words. Ajahni is really cool to work with, because he really likes us and our quirky weirdness, and he wants to embrace that. He’s always ready to try something really out there, which is something I can’t say for most vocalists.

 

A: What sort of music do you guys listen to outside of the genre that you play?

JS: I really like jazz, all types of jazz. And I really like hip-hop. Especially 90’s hip-hop. If there’s any music I could choose to dance to, it’s the 90’s classics.

BC: See, I didn’t know that about Jake, but I should have known that. It just makes sense. That’s the music of my childhood, essentially. When you come in with your jeans on backwards, I’m ready for you. Everybody in Buru Style has been fed a steady dose of reggae and dub by me. Zip files and zip files full of that. I actually haven’t listened to that much dub, but whatever I have to be learning is what I listen to. I’m a grade-A music dork. When I was working on my reggae thesis, I had like a hundred gigs of vinyl ripped that I got from people and literally listened to all of it. I knew it all on this super dork level. Like, you know, chronological order and who was involved and all this stuff.

 

A: What’s your opinion on the Wesleyan music scene? Have there been any major changes since you first came here?

JS: Wesleyan is such an awesome place for music. I haven’t seen it change too much, other than bands coming and going. I feel like  really productive things come out of here.

BC: I agree. I think it’s really cool, really different from a lot of places. I have an interesting view, because I teach drums here now, so a lot of people from the music scene are in classes with me, so I get a real inside look at their bands at what they’re doing. So many people play drums in one band, bass in another, and keyboard in another. I think that’s really cool. I’m in general impressed by how intensely people work it. It’s such a different way than how I approached it when I was younger, when I was in a music school. Everybody was trying to master their instrument, so it’s a much more individual kind of thing, whereas here, it’s more of a collective thing where people are writing music together more. That’s pretty cool. I think there’s pros and cons to each thing, but overall, I’m enamored with the music scene here.

JS: And the receptiveness of the student body. Everyone just goes to see music every weekend. It’s really supportive.

BC: I think it’s unique and wonderful.

 

A: What’s the craziest show you’ve ever played?

JS: I’ll never forget the Halloween show with State Radio. That wasn’t crazy, that was just epic.

BC: We were opening for State Radio at the Calvin Theatre. And we killed it. It was a few years ago and like, everyone’s thinking “how’s this band gonna handle a theater?” And we totally went out and rocked it.

JS: Great costumes too.

BC: There’s been a couple of the WestCo ones that I think were pretty memorable. But then maybe the one at the end of last year in Buddhist house. The one where we ended with the crowd singing for 15 minutes. There was one last spring, at the very end of the year at Buddhist house, which is maybe one of my finest memories.

 

A: What do you see as the future of Buru Style?

BC: It’s dim and bright at the same time. Really, we’ve achieved this sort of nirvana, that kind of plane where I don’t think anyone in the band is very concerned with what anyone thinks about it or anything of the typical music industry model goals. We really trust each other and love to get together when we can. For the summer, I think we played two gigs maybe at which half the band was there. We’re at this point where if half the band is there, we can bring other people in and they’ll get the idea, and as long as they’re good, it’ll work. But then we came back and played that show a couple weeks ago at Buddhist house—it’s just like full-on rager, it just felt like we never stopped. It feels like we’re not gonna go out there and try to knock the world dead and get a manager and do all that stuff. Record, too. There’s a lot of stuff we’ve recorded that hasn’t even come out yet. So the future is some music-making here and there, but not with an intent.

You can listen to and download Buru Style’s music at burustyle.bandcamp.com