Although the mind behind rotating Southeast Asian supergroup Asiabeat has always been gifted Malaysian percussionist (and Fulbright Scholar) Lewis Pragasam, on Spirit Of The People, the heart of Japan moved him towards a sound that’s quite indefinable. Decamping in Singapore, in 1991, Lewis was joined by Makoto Matsushita, Chito Kawachi, and friends Mohd Nor, Nantha Kumar, to create something that took all their influences from his homeland, as well as Vietnam, India, China, and Japan into a unique blend that both expressed little heard dance music and expanded into the world of dance music. Tantric, hypnotic songs meet truly tropical, coastal balearic-cum-instrumentals. It was East meeting deeper East.
Asiabeat began in the absence of something. It began in the capital of Malaysia, right after its British independence, for Lewis. In Kuala Lumpur, Lewis would hang around the cultural stew that was its streets taking in the Indian, Chinese and native Malaysian sounds of the city. At Indian Buddhist temples he’d hear the drumming of the monks, at Chinese cultural centers he’d keep his eyes on the drummers practicing parade march beats, elsewhere he’d hear the tones of street drummers and remember.
Unable to afford any drums, Lewis would save what little money he could and bought himself a small drum set. Entirely self-taught, for years he would dedicate himself to translating what were all these traditional folk techniques onto the new school drum kit. In 1980, his admitted devout dedication culminated in founding Asiabeat and performing on stage at the University of Malaya. Featuring over 60 musicians and a nine-piece “rock” band, it was a sight to behold, Asiabeat congregated indigenous instruments of all stripes with music that didn’t just dip in toes in one sound.
Two albums were released shortly after Asiabeat’s debut. The first one by CBS in Malaysia, 1982’s self-titled debut, tried to fuse the minds of American and Indian musicians with his hypnotic arrangements. 1984’s Dare To Dream used spiritual jazz to create a quite funky, meditative take on Lewis’s increasingly more accessible fusion ideas. By the time of 1991’s Spirit Of The People, it appeared that audiences in his homebase of Southeast Asia and worldbeat aficionados sort of knew what to expect from Lewis. The purposeful move to start anew would prove that Lewis still had new places to uncover.
You can see this demarcation line clearly in a quote from an Amazon customer who spun Spirit Of The People:
“I don’t know what part of Asia that Asiabeat visited but classical guitar and steel drums aren’t what I usually consider Asian. However, the first track is excellent anyway, but nothing on this album sounds very Asian.”
I know that everyone’s boat floats differently but this change was precisely the point. In Singapore, other musicians like Makoto Matsushita and Chito Kawachi were able to explore musical ideas that weren’t entirely of a specific place. Going for a more floating sound, they used technology to introduce ideas from Latin America, maybe some from Africa or from American minimalism, as Lewis equally tried to integrate further dives into his own SE Asian percussion studies. Front and center, Lewis’s own multi-faceted drum kit brought to life all sorts of rhythmic ideas that could be further shape-shifted in the studio.
Where else have you heard ideas like this before? Perhaps in the work of Finis Africae or Bebo Baldan and Steve James, maybe in DJ sets where anything that swings is in. This version of Asiabeat, the one that would create songs like “One Balmy Afternoon”, “The Cycle of Time” and “Carolina” went for atmosphere more than fealty to any locale.
Spirit Of The People’s quicksilver atmosphere would allow someone like Makoto Matsushita to explore his inner fandango and create sublime sun kissed Spanish-tinged guitar lyricism on tracks like “Carolina”. True tantric drum workouts like “The Cycle Of Time” allowed ex-Takami Hasegawa drummer Chito Kawachi to show his impressive offbeat Caribbean-tinged ideas building into/through some of the most hypnotic grooves laid to tape — doesn’t “Land Beneath The Wind” remind you of Haiti’s Mushi & Lakansyel?
In the end, Asiabeat excels in this form not because it’s distinctly “Asian” but because Lewis allowed that idea to mean more than face value, to let the beat move them wherever that may be.