When Beats Antique frontwoman Zoë Jakes takes the stage tonight at the Odgen Theatre, the show will be all about her belly-dance moves.
Beats Antique offers a unique blend of world music and down-tempo electronica, setting the perfect tone for Jakes’ sinuous performances.
Tranced-out grooves happen courtesy of producers/musicians David Satori and Tommy Cappel. They combine live percussion and acoustic instrumentation with looped beats and heavy bass. The resulting spectacle is “about 40 percent live and 60 percent electro-acoustic,” Satori says, with Cappel on drums, Jakes adding percussion on some tracks and Satori picking up varied instruments ranging from the viola to a custom-made Turkish electric banjo.
“It’s a pretty vast frontier we’re getting into,” Satori says of the group, “with live improvisation to expand our music.”
Satori and Cappel are classically trained, with music degrees from the California Institute of Art and Berklee College of Music, respectively. But it was Satori’s world travels that led to the fusion of global sounds the trio now creates.
“I went to Bali, Eastern Europe and Africa and studied gypsy music and Indian music,” Satori says. “Then Zoë’s influence with the Middle Eastern belly dance really shaped the sound.”
Jakes’ background includes touring with several dance companies including the Bellydance Superstars. Her dance techniques combine tribal-fusion belly dance with elements of breakdance, tango and classical Indian dance.
“When we first came together, we didn’t really know what Beats Antique was,” Jakes says. “But our influences are all mixed together, and now it’s an opportunity for us to all really express ourselves.”
The San Francisco trio released its third studio album, “Blind Threshold,” this week. With musical influences spanning hip-hop and jazz, gypsy rock, Afrobeat and Middle Eastern melodies, the album features 16 guest musicians and vocalists, including Blues Traveler frontman John Popper.
Popper shares the same management company as Beats Antique, and like many of the other guest artists on the album, his contributions were added remotely. Satori and Cappel would simply record songs and e-mail the audio files to other artists, who would add their parts and send the files back.
“A friend went to John Popper’s house and actually recorded his part on his couch,” Satori says. “It was amazing how easy it was to do the collaborations.”
For tonight’s show, the trio hopes for an enthusiastic crowd, which it has had at previous shows at Cervantes’ Masterpiece Ballroom and Boulder’s Fox Theatre. Cappel, who lived in Denver and Winter Park in the 1990s, is particularly excited to return.
“The crowds in Denver have this intense high energy,” he says, noting that the fans are as diverse as the band’s influences. “It’s just old music meets new music, so we aren’t pigeonholed into any one age group or style.”
Beats Antique performs tonight at the Ogden Theatre, 935 E. Colfax Ave. 8 p.m., ages 16 and up, $22.
