Eclectic, brass-balled rhythmic powerhouse Elektric Voodoo’s first gig was a modest affair — opening for a cover band at a bar in their hometown of San Diego, California. “The cover band played a song by Grace Potter and the Nocturnals,” Elektric Voodoo’s singer-guitarist and principal songwriter Scott Tournet recalls with a roaring gut laugh.
It’s funny now, but it was awkward in the moment. That’s because Tournet is a founding member of Grace Potter and the Nocturnals — a band in which the guitarist enjoyed chart success, and toured the world’s theaters and stadiums with, sharing stages with icons ranging from Kenny Chesney to Robert Plant, before leaving in 2015. And the song in the bar band’s set that night, “Medicine,” is one Tournet wrote. It’s a moment Tournet lovingly calls, “a cruel joke from the universe.”
“That was my, ‘OK, buddy, you really wanna do this?” he recalls. “Here’s the beginning of the past.”
Elektric Voodoo is an Afrobeat-inspired six- (sometimes seven-) piece dance-rock ensemble that boasts elements from big horns to fiery Latin-jazz percussion, mashed up in a potent Dr. John-homaging sonic gumbo, anchoring songs about love, loss and American life.
As Tournet explains, “I think what makes us different is that we are trying to combine the physicality of rhythm with the emotions of meaningful lyrics and storytelling, so we connect to the body and the mind of our audience. We want our crowds to dance and sweat through Saturday night and then wake up remembering a lyric that helps carry them through the week.”
For Tournet, the current band is more than just a departure from the Nocturnals, it’s an outlet for the musical ideas he had that abounded beyond the block- headed musical margins of radio-friendly heartland rock he’d cut his teeth withinfor 13 years in his previous outfit.
“I’ve always just loved Afro beat,” Tournet explains, name checking influences like Fela Kuti and Antibalas. “I studied it in college, and put together a few compositions, and never really got to scratch that itch, coming from the Nocturnals, which was very down- the-middle musically. ... I was just super bored of that.”
Before debuting on the San Diego club scene, Elektric Voodoo began as one-man band, with Tournet bouncing song ideas off West African rhythmic loops. That formed the basis for the band’s self-titled 2016 debut. By that album’s follow up, 2018’s Animal, Tournet had a horn section on board, with a full-fledged live lineup and many gigs to follow.
A whole greater than the sum of its parts, the band is a veritable musical brain trust of strange bedfellows. Drummer Matt Bozzone and percussionist Tyrone Kiernan are like a rhythmic world atlas, with years of playing West African, South American and Caribbean styles under their belts. Baritone and tenor saxophonists Bradley Nash and Travis Klein (respectively) are both well-schooled jazz musicians, with backgrounds in classical music to boot. And bassist Luke Henning has been a fixture on San Diego’s worldfamous pop-punk and indie-rock scene.
“I just got used to playing with musicians that came from the same exact thing.” Tournet says of his old group, before explaining of Elektric Voodoo, “That was the foundation of the band in a way — breaking past some of the American borders, so to speak, musically.
“Musical togetherness is where it’s at,” Tournet goes on to explain. “Everyone in the band brings a unique set of skills and a lifetime of dedication to their respective instruments. We are a dance band. We are upbeat. With all our imperfections, we come together and create a feel that you can’t make on a laptop."”
And it’s that ensemble that rehearsed for three months in a cramped practice space before heading into the studio to cut Elektric Voodoo’s third LP Telescope (due out
August 20), knocking it out live in the studio, in a week of spirited sessions that wrapped just before the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown began. One of the tracks Tournet is most excited about is “Cross That Line,” a sweaty six-minute tour de force of stylistic curveballs and shifting rhythms. “It’s meant to rattle your cage a bit, aurally,” he says.
That careening, caution-to-the-wind spirit is what makes Tournet & Co.’s eclectic voodoo so electric — playing it safe is not their style.
“I did everything the wrong way,” Tournet says with a laugh, “leaving a successful career, starting a semi-Afro beat band with seven people. I knew that from the beginning. It was kind of a ‘fuck it, jump-in-the-deep-end’ kind of thing to do.
