The Budos Band

The core of the band met as youths while all participating in an after school jazz ensemble at the Richmond Ave. Community Center, in Staten Island, New York. It wasn’t long before their common hunger for the rougher stripped down sounds of Soul Music brought them together for late night ferry rides into Manhattan, where they would sneak in the back door of the No Moore Club downtown to hear bands like Antibalas, the Sugarman Three, and Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings. It was there, in that basement hothouse packed with only the hippest James Brown fanatics and Fela Kuti disciples, where the kernels of instrumental Afro-Soul were first sown into the fertile minds of these talented young men.

After meeting resistance from the band director about the direction they were trying to take the music, they left the Community Center to form Los Barbudos, (spanish for “the bearded ones”) a name which was later trimmed to The Budos Band after one of the boys shaved. With the recruitment of a few horn players from the neighboring borough of Brooklyn, the band began to practice regularly, exploring the outer cosmic boundaries of afro-beat and soul music from the safety of their tiny concrete rehearsal space on Sand St. As they learned and grew together, their music matured, expanding and settling into a groove as deep and as broad as the Hudson Bay itself. By the time they had arranged a chance to play for a Daptone A&R man, their sound had hardened to a diamond. They were signed on the spot and scheduled to go into the studio immediately for a recording session where they would proceed to cut their first full length album in the better part of three nights. Show after show, the Budos Band have proven their ability not only to deliver the unique, afro-psychedelic raw funk sound of their first record live, but to surpass it with dynamic soulful performances that have whipped crowds into dancing frenzies from coast to coast.

With the release of their self-titled debut album in November of 2005, the Budos Band officially joined the ranks of the Daptone Family and began to perform more and more frequently as part of the Daptone Soul Revue. In 2007, they come back with a new album, without changing their recipe. As the scorpion on the cover, “II” is a dangerous record, crawling in the hot sand of desert, swinging from left to right and right to left, relaxing som time in the shadow of a big rock, then running again madly under the hot sun. With his long tail rising to the sky, the scorpion move in silence and get close to his prey and beat it in heart, without feeling any remorse. His poison just took a new victim: you.