Beats Antique rises to the top of Bay Area music scene

There is no hotter band in the Bay Area right now than Beats Antique.

What other local act can boast a sold-out headlining date at San Francisco’s legendary Fillmore (March 25), a booking at Tennessee’s mammoth Bonnaroo festival in June and a major showcase at Texas’ influential South by Southwest next week? Last year saw the band play such festivals as San Francisco’s Outside Lands, Chicago’s Lollapalooza and Austin City Limits.

Also consider that the Oakland world/electronic music trio, consisting of multi-instrumentalists David Satori and Tommy “Sidecar” Cappel and composer/arranger/choreographer Zoe Jakes, has seen its latest album “Blind Threshold” zip up the charts on Amazon and other such sites.

Not bad for an act that has been around for a little more than three years and has been performing live for less than half that time.

“Our first gig was probably two years after recording that first record,” says Satori, referring to 2007’s “Tribal Derivations.” “We had no intentions of performing.”

The Beats Antique story begins in 2005, when Jakes was performing with Miles Copeland’s Bellydance Superstars touring company. One day on the road, at a bar in Pittsburgh, Pa., Jakes was chatting with Copeland, the brother of the Police’s Stewart Copeland, and the talk turned to his desire to find a different kind of belly dance music.

“He was complaining that he wanted a more contemporary Middle Eastern style of music — modern bellydancing music,” Jakes says during a recent interview in Oakland alongside her bandmates. “And I said to him, ‘I can probably make that happen.’ And he said, ‘Really?’

“A couple of months later he called me on it.”

Fortunately, Jakes knew just the people to turn Copeland’s wish into reality. And she just happened to be dating one of them — Satori, a veteran of the popular Afropop troupe Aphrodesia. The duo called another friend — Cappel, whom Jakes had worked with in the Extra Action Marching Band, the self-described “high school marching band on acid” performance troupe — and the newly created Beats Antique ventured into the studio to record a CD.

The result was “Tribal Derivations,” released on Copeland’s CIA record label, which was more like two solo artists’ EPs spliced together than a real full-length band recording effort. Satori took charge of six tracks, and Cappel handled the other half dozen; there was no real collaboration between the two. The tie that bound them was Jakes, who did the final arrangements for the album.

Things changed with the second CD, 2008’s “Collide,” which found the band members mixing their areas of musical expertise — Satori’s knowledge of Afrobeat, Cappel’s love of hip-hop and Jakes’ experience with Balkan and Middle Eastern sounds. And they continued the experimentation in electronic music begun on “Derivations.”

“Our second album, I think, was really where we developed our sound,” Satori says.

That sound, band members say, is absolutely a product of their East Bay environment, which boasts thriving electronic/dance music and world music scenes. The group doesn’t consider itself part of any genre, mainly because the members claim their genre of music doesn’t really exist outside of Beats Antique.

“I almost feel like a bridge,” Jakes says. “We are really just bringing together a bunch of sounds that haven’t been combined before.”

The music comes across as wildly exotic, a swirling mix of global sounds and dance grooves. Much of it is instrumental, though guest vocalists appear on some tracks. The band never set out to impress people with its vast musical vocabulary — but that’s exactly what its done.

“It was never about what would make other people happy,” Jakes says. ‘It was about what would resonate with us artistically.”

The whole process of starting a band, finding a signature sound in the studio and then, finally, making it translate on the live stage — where Beats Antique incorporates Jakes’ belly dancing talents — happened naturally.

“It was like riding a wave,” Cappel says.

The band built its following the old-fashioned way — constant touring — as well as by exploiting social networking sites and online music distribution. The band’s music is widely available on MySpace and YouTube.

“You can put your music out to so many different people,” Cappel says. “It’s awesome.”

Beats Antique is looking to gain new followers with the showcase at South by Southwest, an event that these musicians say is now more important than ever in terms of building a buzz around one’s band.

“It’s all about word of mouth,” Jakes says. “If you have one good moment, at just one good show, that will get passed around I don’t know how many times.

“And when you leave Austin, people will be like, ‘Man, you guys really blew up at SXSW.'”

Read Jim Harrington’s Concert Blog at http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/category/concerts. Follow him at http://twitter.com/jimthecritic.