For Nation Beat, their globe-trotting groove has crossed not only countries, but continents.
And the band’s Brazil-to-New Orleans flight of beats and brass will stop at NYC’s Joe’s Pub on Saturday for an album release show celebrating their fifth LP, “Archaic Humans.”
“We’ve been around for a minute, and in the early years, they were the first kind of established performance space that we did in New York City,” bandleader and drummer/percussionist Scott Kettner told The Post. “And they’ve always supported us through all these years.
“So it’s great to be doing the album release party there. It’s kind of like a homecoming.”
Kettner and his crew — which also includes tenor saxophonist Paul Carlon, trumpeter Mark Collins, trombonist Tom McHugh and sousaphone player Heather Ewer — will bring the same communal spirit that has transcended borders to the collective experience at Joe’s.
“You can dance there if you want or just listen to music. So it’s a unique room,” said Kettner, whose outfit will be joined by progressive hip-hop artist Christylez Bacon and South African singer-songwriter Melanie Scholtz — both guests on “Archaic Humans.”
Like Nation Beat’s musical mix, their new album title — conceptualized by Kettner and his co-writer Carlon — is multilayered.
“The whole concept of the band, really, is that we’re borrowing traditions from these styles of folk music from a hundred years ago,” he said. “We’re carrying those traditions to a modern-day performance … And so ‘Archaic Humans’ is really kind of saying that to live in the present, we have to carry the past. Like, we’re all carrying past DNA of our ancestors.
“And the other layer of that is, we didn’t use any electronics on the album. We’re all playing instruments, and we recorded it live. And that feels kind of like an archaic thing to do these days.”
It’s been a jamming journey for the Florida-born Kettner with Nation Beat, which traces all the way back to him moving to New York in 1998 to study jazz at the New School university.
“My mentor was Billy Hart, the great jazz drummer who played with Miles Davis and Ella Fitzgerald,” he said. “We were getting into a lot of New Orleans music, and then we started getting into a lot of Afro Cuban, and eventually that led down to Brazil.
“And at that time, he was teaching me about samba and bossa nova, and that’s what most people knew about Brazil.”
But then Hart inspired Kettner to explore another Brazilian beat — the “badass rhythm” of maracatu.
“I had to pack my bags and go to Brazil and learn from the people what this music was and what the culture was,” he said. “And while I was there, I started noticing a lot of similarities with the music of New Orleans and the music I grew up with in the South.
“And I wanted to form a band that takes these styles of music from the northeast of Brazil and the southern United States … It’s a conversation between Brazil and the United States.”
While an earlier incarnation of Nation Beat included guitars — even leading them to share the stage with Willie Nelson at Farm Aid — Kettner than made the switch to horns.
“That sound was always in my head,” he said. “So I was ready to make that switch and go full brass and really explore those sounds. But it took some time to reconceptualize some of the drum grooves.”
But now Nation Beat is firmly in the groove on “Archaic Humans,” which Kettner and Carlon began making two years ago, with the goal of making an album of all original music (save one Tom Jobim cover).
“Paul and I wrote back and forth,” he explained. “I would record drum grooves here in my studio and send it to him, and then he would record melodies with the saxophone and send it to me. And we would go back and forth until we got it to a point where we really liked what we had. And then we would bring it to a band rehearsal, and then the band members would have influences.”
The collaborative results will be taking Joe’s Pub to Carnival on Saturday.
“When you go onto the streets of Brazil during Carnival, everybody’s dancing, everybody’s singing, everybody’s participating with the music that’s happening on the streets,” said Kettner. “And I want to capture that energy of community.”
