MacPherson’s Rendition of African Pop Music Hits Plenty of High Notes

Bill MacPherson is a long-haired, red-headed guitarist of Scottish descent who looks something like a young Van Morrison. So it seems a bit incongruous that MacPherson leads a band that concentrates on the African pop music form from Zaire known as Soukous.

But follow the twisted path of MacPherson’s life and everything suddenly makes sense. The son of missionaries, he spent his teen-age years in Zaire, soaking up its sounds and rhythms.

From there, he moved to San Diego, where he picked up the guitar. Then it was on to Boston’s Berklee School of Music to earn a degree, then back to San Diego where, as a graduate student, he rediscovered the music of Zaire. Saturday night he and his five-piece backing band, Third Beat, could be found at Randell’s.

As you might expect, percussion plays a central role in MacPherson’s music. Besides a drummer, a conga-player and a percussionist who focuses on African drums, the group’s keyboard player, Chris Jones, serves as a percussive foil, especially in accompaniment. And the band’s bassist, Nee Sackey who hails from Ghana, has a firm grip on the beat, pounding out his own thumb-driven rhythms on his electric’s strings.

The resulting rhythmic layer cake makes a substantial base that MacPherson frosts with his own sweet-toned guitar lines.

The group’s opening number “Kwilu,” named for the Zairian river, built on a four-beat shuffle that suggested the Nigerian Ju-Ju form popularized by King Sunny Ade. Above this heated tempo, MacPherson suspended guitar lines that recalled early Pat Metheny in their construction and tonal quality.

His solo built quickly to a dynamic peak, then stayed there, matching intertwined lines with chordal strums. Then the beat suspended as drummer Michael Evans and bassist Sackey spaced their insistent beat with silence, building a bridge back to the theme.

That MacPherson’s sound is a hybrid was apparent from the mix of styles presented in the hourlong set. Sackey’s “Purple Flower” was a mid-tempo funk piece to which MacPherson applied harder-edged tones and temperament. The guitarist switched to a nylon-stringed acoustic instrument for the samba-like feel of his “A Cool Warmth,” delivering warm statements that were accented by percussionist Jason Hann’s talking drum.

“Shakin’ It Out,” dedicated to the recent quake that made a mess of MacPherson’s Sherman Oaks home, opened with a danceable African figure, but soon developed a tightly formed groove that allowed keyboardist Jones to soar.

Jones shone throughout the set, using acoustic tones from his synthesizer to serve up Herbie Hancock-inspired runs and chordal play. Improvising with bell-like electric sounds, his playing became more rhythmic as he splashed note-combinations against Sackey’s bass riff and the band’s wall of percussion.

And, of course, there were plenty of breaks where the percussionists took total control, usually led by Hann on the djembe drum cradled between his knees. These forays between percussionists took on the form of conversations with one drummer taking the lead as the other two rattled behind.

Though there were times that music might have been more tightly constructed, especially at points of change, its overall feel was one of groove and variation, with finely spun guitar lines strung over a tense, rhythmic framework.

MacPherson has found an appropriate direction to pursue, one that speaks to his personal history as well as the shrinking face of the musical world. Third Beat is the kind of cross-cultural musical exploration that celebrates the similarities and the differences between our planet’s inhabitants.