Ranky Tanky’s mission: Preserving Gullah music
South Carolina band brings stirring African sound to two Bay Area shows
With the release of Ranky Tanky’s 2017 self-named debut album, the South Carolina band brought welcome attention to Gullah culture, which continues to thrive in a resilient archipelago of coastal black communities that have passed down West African traditions for centuries. Rather than taking a musicological or preservationist stance, Ranky Tanky’s musicians infused traditional Gullah songs with their love of jazz and other African diaspora forms. Adding a jazz combo’s instrumentation to songs traditionally rendered via body percussion and a cappella call-and-response vocals introduced a vast new audience to music imbued with inordinate spiritual power. The album topped the jazz charts. Following on the heels of last year’s “Good Time” (Resilience Music) the quintet returns to the Bay Area next week for performances at Berkeley’s Freight & Salvage on Wednesday and Santa Cruz’s Kuumbwa Jazz Center on Jan. 30. More than feel-good music, Ranky Tanky’s repertoire bristles with a sense of mission. The sheer density of rhythmic information embedded in Ranky Tanky grooves speaks to the band’s lifelong immersion in Gullah culture. Drummer Quentin Baxter credits his vast rhythmic toolkit to his deep upbringing in the church. “It’s not just me,” he says, adding that trumpeter-vocalist Charlton Singleton shared his experience of being swaddled in a sacred community. “He was the son of a minister and I’m the grandson of one and we grew up always in church at all times,” Baxter says. “The music of this culture was deeply embedded in Christianity. Once we have the understanding of a song’s tempo we can break it down from domination to neighborhood to what choir it might have been.” Church provided a foundation, but Baxter, Singleton, bassist Kevin Hamilton and guitarist Clay Ross also pursued their love of secular music. They met in the mid-’90s as music students at the College of Charleston and eventually formed a jazz quartet called the Gradual Lean with a repertoire that ranged from Duke Ellington to Rick James. “The band was exploring jazz standards, the vocabulary of bebop and hard bop, but no one wanted to give up playing funky music,” Baxter says. “We started to get noticed because we’d say you and your lady are having a special birthday. We’d walk in and play her favorite song, before anyone working at the restaurant could even say anything. As the drummer, this wasn’t easy. But we started to get a great following.” The four friends all ended up taking separate paths. Baxter ended up joining the band of jazz vocalist René Marie around 2004, and he’s anchored her ensemble ever since. Around the time Ranky Tanky started to come together in 2016 he was also touring with pianist-vocalist Freddy Cole, a music treasure whose career has never quite escaped the shadow of his legendary older brother Nat “King” Cole. It’s a testament to Baxter’s versatility that he provided these two very different vocalists, on the occasions I saw him accompanying them, with exactly the kind of support they required. “Freddy was already 80 when I joined the band,” he recalls, noting that he had to give up the gig once Ranky Tanky got busy. “You had to play with a sensibility that made him sound powerful with energy not volume. You can’t be in a hurry with the tempo. René on the other hand is a powerhouse in every way. She writes her own music with the members of the band in mind. If you don’t play your butt off she’s going ask you if you’re feeling OK.” The idea for Ranky Tanky came from guitarist Ross, who’d started playing in Matuto, a New York band blending jazz with northeastern Brazilian rhythms. Upon returning to Charleston, he started delving into Gullah roots music from sacred songs to children’s chants, sounds he was familiar with but that weren’t part of his upbringing. He brought several Gullah pieces into a rehearsal with his old Gradual Lean bandmates “and we taught him how we went about it,” Baxter says. “It sounded great. We played a couple of shows and that was that. But eventually Clay came back to town and said no one else is doing this.” The final Ranky piece fell into place when they recruited vocalist Quiana Parler, who’d earned an avid following around the South Carolina Lowcountry while inspiring a jolt of local pride to the region with her successful run on the 2003 season of “American Idol.” “We started with modest intentions, and now we’re really writing our own music, too,” Baxter says. “We’ll keep going deeper and deeper until we decide it’s deep enough. And in the meantime it’s a lot of fun.”