Giving it their all

At one point during Wednesday’s concert by Yerba Buena, New York’s Afro-Latin fusion band, two male musicians took off their shirts and hopped offstage into the crowd at the Conga Room. In front of surprised fans, the muscular conguero and the dreadlocked singer faced off in a crouching, sweaty, shoulder-shaking rumba that evoked the virile street dancing of old Havana slave communities.

They did down and gritty Cuban moves, deeply rooted in African rituals and traditions. The moment didn’t get any more authentic only because city codes prohibit sacrificing chickens in local nightclubs.

The dance-floor demonstration was just a sidelight in Yerba Buena’s exciting performance, marking its local debut as headliners. But it offered a revealing deconstruction of at least one element in the band’s complex musical melange of salsa, rap, cumbia, funk, jazz and Santeria chants.

Instrumentally, Yerba Buena is a power sextet: bass, guitar, drums, congas, sax and trumpet. Venezuelan guitarist-composer-arranger Andres Levin adds pre-recorded samples without letting the electronic touches interfere with the live performance. A coed front line of four Cubans commands center stage. The two rumba dancers are percussionist-vocalist Pedro Martinez and bearded singer El Chino, who moves as if he had a gelatin skeleton. The women are backup singer Cucu Diamantes and lead singer Xiomara Laugart, whose clear and beautiful voice is definitely underutilized in Yerba Buena’s mix, on record and onstage.

Seeing Yerba Buena is a little like watching those cooking segments on morning TV talk shows, where ingredients are mixed before a pre-prepared final product is pulled from the oven. In this case, the finished dish is the band’s recent debut album, “President Alien,” a skillful studio confection that results in a surprising and fresh new sound.

But there’s something too calculated about the album. On stage, this fusion experiment becomes a real band. Yerba Buena seems to play for fun, the key ingredient. They’re like a multi-ethnic gathering of friends who share one another’s music with the wonder that it all somehow synchronizes, as do their lives in the big city.