The local ensemble Joia’s new CD, World Percussion, does not inspire much language. It just makes you want to drum and dance along, two things I do rather poorly. 

Fortunately, there was a West African dancer and drummer in my house when this collection of a half-dozen percussion jams rolled in. He responded in a most appropriate and flattering way: He danced and drummed.

Joia took him back "to the old days." Not the tribe - it didn’t go that deep - but Brooklyn in the ‘60s when he was a dance star. This man danced the boogaloo and the Boston Monkey up and down my shotgun apartment.

Then he said, "I can put my thing in there, it sounds good, steady. I can drum on top of that." So he did. Not far behind was the singing of old songs over the top of their jams, not quite a perfect fit, but he felt so good by then it didn’t stop him. 

This should be good news for Joia, who use African titles in their songs and a quote from Olatunji on their jacket. Of course, Joia’s rhythms go back to Africa by one route or another. Furthermore, they declare in a promotional brochure, "We empower everyone with our healing music, song and spirit to join in the celebration!" It worked for one dance-happy African. Perhaps it will work for you. Joia are probably more powerful live. They perform at Molly’s at 9 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 10, and for the Soulard Mardi Gras Parade at noon on Saturday, Feb. 17.
 

There was a bit of internal controversy when this category was put together, with some debates breaking out over which bands exactly do play worldbeat. Well, readers don’t seem to mind giving Reggae at Will their fourth crown this year. Others would say that Joia, the Hands Across America of percussion outfits, beat the drums best. After that, it’s a funky batch of divergent sounds, like the sambalicious El Caribe Tropical, the newcomers/old-timers of Bella Wolf and Indian classicist Imrat Khan.

1. Reggae at Will

2. JOIA

3. El Caribe Tropical

4. Murder City Players

5. Funkabilly

6. Goza

7. Bella Wolf

8. Imrat Khan

9. Solucion Latina

When Bradley Drury was an adolescent, he saw Brando in Mutiny on the Bounty and fell in love with the sounds of the Polynesian musicians. "I wanted to reproduce that," he remembers. He started - unpromisingly, so far as the Polynesian sound goes - on violin and viola. He began to pick up percussion along the way. He became a sambista here in St. Louis. In the summer of ‘94 he began meeting at sundown to drum with friends by the St. Louis Art Museum. From those informal gatherings Joia took shape.

"We’re a world-music percussion ensemble," he says, "with a maximum of 16 performers. We started with samba. Afro-Cuban rhythms are our claim to fame. But we have added patterns from Japan, the Middle East, Africa. We encourage people not to sit on their ass; we are not a band to sit and watch." Hence their mission statement: "As in music - so in life - Joia is a highly mobile percussion group dedicated to exposing people to the high-energy, life-celebrating rhythms of brazil, Africa and the world."

Because they like to move, and drums like to echo off the walls of enclosed spaces, Joia has done mostly outdoor events - Soulard parades, the Missouri Botanical Garden, Taste of Clayton, the gates of the Trans World Dome before football games. At 8 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 2, they play indoors, on their first double bill with the choral group Charis, at the Ethical Society.

-Chris King

Leave it to a band that doesn’t play anything remotely alt-rock to provide one of the most alternative sets of the MRMF. A 16-member samba and world percussion ensemble based in St. Louis, Joia nearly blows the roof off the place with its’ terrific drum thunder. With turn-on-a-dime timing and passionate delivery, this crazy dashiki-clad crew has plenty of brains beneath the martial muscle. All that primal percussion has people shaking their booty right and left.