By Frank Matheis. Photos by Bibiana Huang Matheis (c) 2017
It’s precisely at this moment when a writer is confronted with the inescapable realization that the attempt to realistically and meaningfully write about music is sometimes so utterly impossible that the mere effort seems like an unattainable absurdity. Some things you just got to see and do. Writing about it later is like telling people what a kiwi tastes like, when they never had it. It does not do them any good.
So let’s just say it’s a good thing that the small Riverfront stage on the opening day of the 2017 New Orleans French Quarter Festival was open-air. Otherwise, the Love Evolution packed that stage with enough combustive, raw musical energy they would have exploded the building into smithereens and the few hundred souls in the audience would have ended up swimming in the muddy Mississippi.
While throngs of people gathered their lawn chairs around the big main stage on the opening day of the festival, on April 6, 2017, expecting to see some kind of big time act, they were in fact treated to perfectly fine, easily digestible but bland fuddy-duddy fare.
They had no idea that one small stage over, just a few hundred yards away, the relatively newcomer ensemble, the ebullient Love Evolution, stole the show as the bloody biggest sensation of this year’s French Quarter festival.
Fronted by the husband and wife duo of the inimitable Semaj C. Douglas and her conquering husband Jordan Lorrius, they go by the duo name of Semaj & Mr. Lorrius. When they are joined by a wooly band of untamable musicians they transform into the riotous Love Evolution, a wild ensemble that plain and simple does whatever they want, utterly anarchistic and unbound by any genre delineation or convention.
Maybe nobody gave them the big long rulebook of all the things you are not supposed to do when marketing a band in the 21St Century, but most likely they just wouldn’t care anyway. It was kind of like Sun Ra’s Arkestra meets the Wu-Tang Klan, meets George Clinton, meets Alicia Keys. It was unclear whether we were witnessing sophisticated complex theatrical musical arrangements or just unbridled freeform jam band exuberance, but it sounded good. Whatever you like, it was in there. Semaj and her niece, the back-up singer Kirsten Keller, a student at Loyola, sometimes seemed like Motown Soul singers, sometimes like Beyonce meets Lauren Hill, sometimes sweetly and other times sultry, like two manic divas ready to write their names on the wall ten feet tall. The shirtless Mr. Lorrius gracefully pranced around the stage looking like a fierce African warrior who had just slain a lion to deliver to his new bride’s parents on his wedding day, his athletic torso exposed and his braids straight up African style. Samaj would sing soul and funk, and her man, Mr. Lorrius, would come in behind with a hip hop juxtaposition that sometimes had Caribbean, sometimes Afrobeat undertones. A boisterous rhythm section held down the beat. They could either have been with a Jamaican reggae ensemble, or the Funkadelics. Macht nix! They also had a cool jazz trumpet player named Troy Sawyer who might want to be in a bebop jazz band, or a New Orleans brass band, were it not for the hip-hop soul blues, the Afro-Eurasian boogie soul. Then, of course, there was the crazy Black Magic Drummers ensemble, six or eight of them, who added a thunderous, unbridled backbeat to the whole thing, playing as if someone had spiked the marching band’s snare drum ensemble’s Gatorade with mescaline.
Wild times in New Orleans!
It was dynamic, delirious, unbridled and joyful. The audience was infected by the sheer fun and nobody could walk past this performance and not stop in total enthrallment. It was true fun. To top it all off, a couple of young kids from the elementary school came up to dance with their teacher Semaj. Love Evolution added everything on top of everything and it added up to everything. And it worked! Yet nobody could exactly explain what it was.
It leaves open the question: Who are these crazy, cool and beautiful people? They met in New York City, live in New Orleans, are college educated, smart, articulate, creative and energetic. Both are teachers and both work with children. They are both athletic. Semaj was a serious volleyball player in college. Mr. Lorrius, a descendant of a family originally from Haiti, looks like a combination of a dancer and personal trainer. Just looking at his abs will evoke guilt in most every man. They dance euphorically during their performances. They are both into the culinary arts. They are both look like models and are serious achievers. Mr. Lorrius was a UN Goodwill Ambassador who worked in the developing world reaching out to people with film and music. Semaj is a powerfully articulate and strong woman, a role model for the young kids she nurtures. On the side, they are entrepreneurs of their own line of super foods supplements. Give it up!
They are loving parents, with a beautiful young daughter Zenn, after who they named their subdued and languidly gentle duo album that is nothing like the Love Evolution, but sounds good anyway. When they talk about their music, they say things like “We want to bring intentional music to artistic spaces to create communities.” “We want to move beyond destructive revolution to peaceful musical evolution.” “We are energy recycled.” “People will evolve through music.” They are about love, community and touching people’s heart. You got to love them!
They are on the verge of something great, but too unconventional to define what exactly that will be. These are special, powerful people who can do anything because they do what they want to do on their own terms, personally and musically.
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Frank Matheis is a music journalist and radio producer residing in the Hudson Valley of New York. A regular contributing writer to Living Blues magazine, editor of thecountryblues.com and co-author with Phil Wiggins of the book “Sweet Bitter Blues” he loves the blues…and many other types of music.