The temperature had dipped below freezing outside, but on a cold February night in Ballard the Tractor Tavern burned bright with the rapid-fire, intricate, kinetic drumming of Thai drummer and bandleader Salin.
Decked out in a glittering sequined jumpsuit, beaming from ear to ear with a huge smile, Salin brought her vision of cultural connection, inspired in equal parts by the rural folk music of Northeast Thailand and the cosmopolitan jazz and funk worlds of her home in Montréal. She visited Seattle ahead of her upcoming album, Rammana, coming March 28.
Salin made the album partially in Canada, availing herself of the city’s great musicians, and partially in Thailand, working with folk musicians. While traveling to the Northeast of the country, she also captured some of Thailand’s nearly lost tribal music on video and field recordings.
Rammana brings this all together into what Salin calls ”Afro jazz and Thai funk,” a seemingly improbable connection between the Fela Kuti psychedelic Afrobeats she loves, the soul, jazz, and R&B she discovered in Montréal, and the rural Thai folk music known as molam. Driven by the deep precision and impeccable groove of her drumming and by her vision as a bandleader, it’s a new sound that works incredibly well, bringing something different to the well worn treads of jazz and funk.
Though these different threads of music may seem worlds apart, Salin sees them all as interconnected ideas. The key jazz element of improvisation lies at the heart of Thai molam as well, a music that developed from the influence of Americans in Thailand and Laos during the Vietnam war.
“It's very much like jazz in the way that they tell stories through their improvisation,” she explained on her way down to Portland by train the next day. “Even the way that the drums and the bass kind of correspond with and copy with each other, playing the soloist in a way. That is also like jazz.”
Even though Thailand has an interesting history with jazz – the well loved Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadej was a jazz fanatic and well versed saxophone player known around the world – Salin mostly experienced pop music growing up in the heart of Bangkok. Montréal was her awakening to other music styles.
”Montréal has such a vibrant scene,” she said. “There's a little bit of everything really, and that's how I discovered funk, and soul, and jazz, and also Afrobeat.”
By Afrobeat, she’s speaking of the West African psychedelia of the great Fela Kuti, not necessarily today’s wave of Nigerian pop stars, though she does love the driving global beats of South African amapiano which fuel many late night Montréal dance parties. She also got connected to the Haitian community in Montréal, drumming for Haitian jazz/roots singer Dominique Fils-Aimé and producing the JUNO-nominated jazz album of Haitian sister duo Bel and Quinn.
This was Salin’s first Pacific Northwest tour and she drew an impressive crowd to the Monday night show, boosted in part by her social media following. The packed audience at the Tractor Tavern in Seattle was dance-happy and jazz-forward, eager to cheer after an exceptional instrumental solo, and warmed up by local jazz funk explorers i///u.
Local drummer Collin Schulze attended the show to see Salin. He said he found her music through her popular Instagram page, which features Salin drumming in beautiful Thai landscapes.
“I love her groove,” he said “And I’m inspired by artists that are drummers and bandleaders.”
Schulze mentioned the masterful interplay between Salin’s tight band and her rock solid rhythm section and talked about Salin’s “sense of pocket,” meaning her ability to embody the groove as a drummer.
There was a kind of kismet to Salin’s Seattle show, a sense of distant connections coming together. Opening band i///u brought out a surprise guest, Seattle singer/rapper Nathan Nzanga, a first generation Congolese-American.
In Montréal, Salin’s been working to bring the guitar rhythms of Congolese soukous–a staple of the city’s immigrant community music scene–together with the psych’d out picking of molam’s three string phin guitar.
The show also offered the opportunity for reunions. Salin welcomed the Iowan family that hosted her when she was a 16-year-old Thai exchange student coming to America to learn English for a year. She also welcomed her high school music teacher at the show, a Seattle-based teacher who met her in Bangkok when he taught at her school for a few years on an exchange.
Maybe “exchange” should have been the theme for the night, so many cultures and communities coming together in Salin’s music, each trading ideas and inspiration and coming away from her music all the richer.
