Funk Fusion Band Kung Fu Brings High-Energy Dance Party to Alabama Music Box

Touring funk-fusion quintet Kung Fu is bringing its high-energy live show to the Alabama Music Box in Mobile this Saturday, May 4, 2013, promising one of the most electrifying dance parties the Port City has seen in recent months.

The stop is part of a touring schedule that has kept the band on the road nearly continuously, building its audience city by city in the tradition of American jamband and funk acts. For Mobile music fans, it is a chance to catch a nationally touring group in an intimate downtown club setting — the kind of room where a five-piece band with a horn can fill every corner with sound.

A sound they call Nu-sion

Kung Fu has coined the term “Nu-sion” to describe their distinctive blend of dance-friendly grooves and electro-fusion. Despite drawing heavily from electronic music influences, the Connecticut-based band keeps its instrumentation refreshingly organic, building its wall of sound from drums, bass, guitar, keyboards, and saxophone.

The name is more than marketing. In an era when electronic dance music increasingly dominates clubs and festivals, Kung Fu has staked out a middle path: music that borrows the textures, tempos, and build-drop dynamics of electronic dance while remaining firmly in the hands of five musicians playing instruments on a stage. No laptops stand in for the band — the synths and effects are played live, the grooves are driven by a rhythm section, and the saxophone adds a voice that no dance producer can program.

The result is something like a 1970s funk outfit that somehow landed in the middle of a modern electronic dance event, a combination that has earned comparisons to New Orleans jazz-funk favorites like Galactic.

The Galactic comparison places Kung Fu in a lineage of Gulf Coast-friendly funk — bands built for late-night festival sets and sweaty club floors, where extended grooves and instrumental interplay matter as much as song craft. For Mobile audiences raised on the New Orleans sound that drifts east across the state line, that reference point is a natural bridge to the band’s aesthetic.

Connecticut might seem an unlikely home base for a funk band, but the Northeast corridor has produced a thriving scene of groove-based jam acts in recent years, with Kung Fu among its standard-bearers. The band’s members came up through conservatory and club training alike, and that blend of chops and party-starting instinct has become the group’s calling card: technically sophisticated music that never forgets its job is to move a dance floor.

Proven performers on the festival circuit

The band has been rapidly building a reputation on the national festival circuit, delivering improvisation-heavy sets that routinely transform crowds into massive, spontaneous dance parties.

Festival stages have become the proving ground for bands in Kung Fu’s lane. A festival set demands more than a replay of studio material: audiences camped out for a weekend want improvisation, surprises, and the sense that they are witnessing something unrepeatable. Kung Fu’s sets lean into that expectation, stretching grooves, trading solos, and reading the crowd in real time — the skills that separate touring acts that endure from those that fade after a first album.

At the recent Aura Music Festival at Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park in Live Oak, Florida, Kung Fu delivered a memorable Stevie Wonder tribute set alongside vocalist Nigel Hall, showcasing the kind of deep musical skill that allows them to reimagine classic material while keeping audiences moving.

The Suwannee park, in the pines of north Florida a few hours’ drive from the Gulf Coast, is one of the Southeast’s most beloved festival grounds, and the Aura festival draws the same improvisational-music crowd Kung Fu has been cultivating. The Stevie Wonder tribute gave the band a showcase for its range — Wonder’s catalog demands both funk firepower and genuine harmonic sophistication — with vocalist Nigel Hall, a favorite of the New Orleans scene, adding a soulful centerpiece to the set.

A packed summer ahead

Kung Fu has a packed summer festival schedule ahead, with appearances slated at events including the Mad Tea Party and All Good Festival.

The summer calendar is where touring acts make their year, and Kung Fu’s slate reflects its rising stock. All Good Festival, long one of the mid-Atlantic’s premier jam and roots music gatherings, has hosted legendary names across its history, and a slot there signals the band’s standing in the national scene. The Mad Tea Party and similar regional events round out a season that will keep the quintet crisscrossing the country between club dates.

That touring rhythm — club shows on weeknights and in smaller markets, festivals on weekends — is how bands at this level build momentum. Each market visited is a seed planted: the crowd at an Alabama Music Box show in May becomes the word-of-mouth that follows the band to the next regional festival and back again on the next tour.

Mobile’s independent venue scene

The Alabama Music Box has established itself as one of Mobile’s key stops for touring original music, hosting national and regional acts in a downtown setting that puts the audience close to the stage. For a band like Kung Fu — whose live show depends on energy exchanged with the crowd — the club format is a natural fit, and for Mobile fans, rooms like it provide access to national touring acts without a drive to New Orleans or Pensacola.

Downtown Mobile’s music district has grown steadily as a destination, with clubs, bars and venues within walking distance of each other feeding a night economy that city leaders have worked to cultivate. A Saturday night with a national touring funk band in the mix is exactly the kind of draw that keeps the district busy and keeps touring acts routing through the Port City rather than skipping it.

The details

But Mobile audiences will not have to travel far for a taste of what the band has to offer. Tickets for Saturday night at the Alabama Music Box are just $10, making it one of the most affordable ways to experience a nationally touring act in downtown Mobile this weekend.

The $10 cover is a statement in itself. In an era of climbing ticket fees and reserved seating, a ten-dollar door for a national act is the kind of pricing that keeps independent venues and their crowds close — accessible enough for a college student, cheap enough for a spontaneous Saturday night decision. For the price of a movie ticket, Mobile music fans get a full evening of a band that festival crowds across the country have been paying considerably more to see.

Show night promises the full Kung Fu experience: a quintet of players who have spent months on the road tightening their groove, a repertoire that slides from funk and fusion into electronic-tinged dance music, and the improvisational risk-taking that makes each set its own event. For Gulf Coast funk fans, the question is less whether to go than how early to get there — because in rooms this size, the dance floor fills fast.

Funk’s new generation

Kung Fu’s rise parallels a broader revival of funk and groove music among younger American audiences. Bands formed in the last decade have taken the horn-driven, rhythm-first music of the 1970s — the language of James Brown, Parliament and the great studio bands of the soul era — and run it through modern amplifiers, keyboards and festival economics. The audience that shows up for these acts is often decades younger than the originals’ fan base, and it arrives expecting to dance rather than sit.

The saxophone in Kung Fu’s lineup is a distinguishing marker in that scene. Many electro-fusion acts build entirely around keyboards and processed sound, but a live horn adds an expressive, human quality — a wail, a riff, a solo line that cuts through the mix. Paired with a rhythm section that can lock into a groove for minutes at a time, the band’s five-piece configuration gives it the dynamic range of a much larger outfit.

Improvisation remains the connective tissue. Like the jam bands that share the festival circuit, Kung Fu treats its songs as starting points, opening sections for group improvisation that differ night to night. The practice demands musicians who listen as much as they play, and it rewards audiences who follow the band from show to show to hear what changes.

The Gulf Coast audience

Mobile sits at a crossroads of American groove music. New Orleans, the birthplace of funk’s deepest traditions, is a short drive west, and the festival culture that surrounds it — Jazz Fest, the late-night club circuit, the second-line tradition — spills across the Gulf Coast into South Alabama. Pensacola and Panama City Beach to the east add their own venues and beach-festival calendars to the mix.

Into that geography, a Connecticut funk band with a New Orleans-tinged sound and a $10 door charge slots neatly. The Alabama Music Box crowd on a Saturday night in May 2013 will include festival veterans who caught the band at Aura weeks earlier, jam-scene followers tracking the summer schedule, and plenty of ordinary Mobile music fans drawn by a cheap ticket and a good recommendation.

What they will find is the same thing the festival crowds have found: a band at the height of its touring powers, playing rooms small enough that the energy has nowhere to go but back and forth between stage and floor. The band’s fusion of vintage funk and modern dance music has been building audiences in market after market, and the Mobile stop is a chance to see why — at a price that leaves plenty of budget for the rest of the night downtown.