Bio

What a year 2006 has already been for Aphrodesia! Taking their intoxicating show international for the first time, the 11 piece San Francisco-based musical extravaganza went far off the beaten path and back to the roots of their music by touring West Africa for the entire month of February. The trip landed them in Ghana, Togo, Benin and Nigeria- where, over two incredible nights of playing with Femi Kuti, Aphrodesia made history by becoming the first American band ever to play the legendary New Africa Shrine in Lagos, Nigeria. Who is Aphrodesia? If you don’t know yet, you soon will.

Emerging in 2003 from the fertile San Francisco Bay Area music scene, Aphrodesia’s highly original brand of ‘Super Aphro Beat’ and uncompromising political stance made them resist easy classification. In 2004, the band exploded into the national consciousness with the “Just Vote Tour”, a swing-state voter registration tour that took the band all the way to NYC and back in their vegetable oil-powered bus and landed the group on the cover of USA Today. The band’s debut CD, “Shackrobeat Vol. 1” (Flatbed Lamborghini), was picked as one of the best records of 2003 by the East Bay Express, and showstopping performances in 2004 and 2005 at the Aspen JazzFest, the Earthdance Festival, the Sierra Nevada World Music Festival, the High Sierra Music Festival and many other festivals and venues won the group high praise. The band’s second CD, 2005’s “Front Lines” (Full Cut Records), was featured on National Public Radio, won rave reviews from media outlets from Global Rhythm Magazine to Jambase.com and broadened the band’s already wide appeal even further, setting the stage for their landmark trip to Africa.

Aphrodesia’s extraordinary sonic stew encompasses touches of Afrobeat, Highlife, dub, funk, Caribbean spice and East African trance music, all with the captivating vocal stylings of Lara Maykovich as their focal point. After living in Ghana and Zimbabwe during 1997 and ’98, where she studied and performed with members of Akrowa Dance Ensemble of Ghana. the National Music and Dance Company of Zimbabwe and many others, Maykovich returned to Boulder, Colorado, where she sang with The Motet and performed with Boubacar Diabete. She met bassist Ezra Gale soon after moving to the Bay Area in 2002, and the pair then recruited a stellar supporting cast that now includes guitarists Chris Mulhauser and David Sartore, percussionist Paul Sonnabend, the horn section of Todd Grady, Liz Larson and Marcus Stephens, the backing vocals of Nicole Rodriguez and Maya Dorn and the inimitable rhythms of the drummer known only as Slapsaw.

Aphrodesia’s music carries with it a strong sense of social justice, and the band has been known to write their own politically-charged lyrics while updating Fela Kuti classics like ‘No Agreement’ and ‘Zombie’. But the band’s commitment to social change extends offstage as well. Having headlined numerous benefits for causes ranging from AIDS prevention to Tsunami Relief to anti-Iraq War organizations, Aphrodesia is devoted to ‘walking the walk as well as talking the talk’. Believing that alternative energy is necessary both to protect our planet’s environment and to reduce America’s dangerous dependence on foreign oil, the band proudly travels in a vegetable-oil powered bus- meaning it’s one of the few groups of any stripe not sponsored by Chevron, Texaco, and co. It may be a small start, but the group believes that its actions, like its music, can have a huge effect.

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