Chachuba

Palindromic prog rockers Dopapod have been inspiring musicians since forming over a decade ago in Boston. Perhaps their least symmetrical moment came when they somehow provided the nomenclature for Chachuba, a four-piece from Chicago that waltzes through electronic and improvisational compositions on a solid backbone of jazz fusion.

Chachuba’s Sean DiCosola recounts to PureHoney how it all came to be while he was hanging out at a summer music festival awhile back: “I was telling my buddy about [Dopapod]; he’d never heard of them. He was a little messed up that day and instead of asking when we were going to see Dopapod, he kept saying ‘When are we seeing Chachuba?’” 

The serendipitous mangling of the name was the spark that took DiCosola’s musical aspirations from idea to execution. As Chachuba’s producer and keys/synths player, he’s joined by Jimmy Klimek on guitar, Nate Beitz on bass and Gary Goodheart on drums. The quad of self-taught players with disparate backgrounds has coalesced into a multi-genre experiential unit.

“We take a lot of different genres and influences and mesh them all together as one wall of sound when we play,” says DiCosola. “With live looping and instrumental improvs, we cover so many different frequencies for a really ‘out there’ sound.”

Their growing fanbase is just as eclectic. With electronic dance music as a faint metronome, Chachuba employs melodic guitars, different platforms of drumming and percussive applications, and loops as guiding Sherpas for dreamy trance excursions and dance club bass pulsations. Elements of DiCosola’s early days focusing on improvised electronica remain as shiny diamonds on the lush landscapes Chachuba create.

Their latest full-length, “Lost the Mountain,” is as accurate a rendition of their live performance as one could hope for from a largely improvisational outfit. They’ll be “squaring off” in special edition of Ray’s Downtown Presents at Voltaire in West Palm Beach.

Their sparring partners are Brass Lightning, a horns, bass and drums quintet from New Orleans who mine funk and soul for booty-shaking gold. They, too, come to this sonic match with a jazzy pedigree and their own take on how to branch out for maximum, cross-genre effect.

Chachuba perform with Brass Lightning at 8pm Sunday June 30 at Voltaire in West Palm Beach. GET TICKETS: $5 EARLY BIRD / $8 ADVANCE / $10 DAY OF SHOW ~ Abel Folgar