His father was a record distributor, specializing in merengue. His mother, a self-taught pianist, was a female radio personality on a New York City Latin music station. Garcia, a first-generation Cuban American, was born and bred in a New Jersey suburb (with stints in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico) speaking Spanish and English. “I’ve devoured music since I was little,” he says. The easygoing, 36-year-old Garcia wears chunky rectangular glasses, a baseball hat with New Jersey patch, and has a thick, subtly sculpted beard. “I grew up in the era of disco roller-skating,” he adds. KCRW DJ Jason Bentley, a self-described “sucker for dance music,” says the unusual mix reminds him of growing up in inner-city Boston, where he remembers the mix of Irish, Puerto Rican and African American kids on the subway, or on the corner playing boomboxes. The slick electronics, fused with the rhythmic principles of Afrobeat, produce an electro-earthy sound that is simultaneously familiar and entirely new.Ĭhico Mann’s second CD, “ Analog Drift,” was released in late 2010 on Wax Poetics and has been getting airtime on progressive radio stations such as the influential KCRW in Los Angeles, where it was the No. 1-played CD several weeks after its release. The music is a sunny, funky, electronic explosion, with flourishes of synthesized keyboards and drumbeats, mixed with soulful guitar licks and Garcia’s call-and-response singing in both Spanish and English. Garcia is the force behind the “Afrobeat freestyle” band Chico Mann, which will perform Thursday at the Eighteenth Street Lounge. “I’m one of the first people to take it into a new direction,” Garcia declares, amid the stacks of compressors, speakers, MIDI controllers, synthesizers and laptops in his ground-floor, Jersey City studio.

Across the Hudson River from Manhattan, musician Marcos Garcia has been creating the next wave of Afrobeat, the music originally conceived by the late Nigerian Fela Kuti.

Chico and the man midi