culture@dailylobo.com
Violinist Muni Kulasinghe found inspiration in a Polish gypsy who played violin with the opposite hand, held it upright on his knee like a cello and grabbed the bow in a fist. Most violinists would say the gypsy’s technique was all wrong, but to Kulasinghe, everything was right.
“Any violinist who sees or hears that would think that it would just be this squawking noise, horrible sound, but it was an amazing, fluid beautiful sound,” Kulasinghe said. “I bought a recording from him and his guitarist and I listened to it over and over again, and two or three years later I found that I’d adopted a lot of his stylistic choices.”
Kulasinghe is the violinist in “Le Chat Lunatique,” one of Albuquerque’s most popular homegrown bands, which calls its style of music “dirty, mangy jazz.”
Kulasinghe started playing the violin when he was 6 years old and was trained classically for most of his youth. He said that one day he got bored with practicing and started messing around with improvisation, and met some talented, like-minded musicians in college.
After that, it was all a matter of fate.
He said he met Fernando Garavito, the band’s drummer, at a jazz jam Downtown and they drank and talked all night. He met guitarist John Sandlin through the Tricklock Theatre Company, and found bassist Jared Putnam at a post-Globalquerque event.
“Pretty much the second time we played together we were like, ‘We should start a band. It’s stupid not to do something with this,’” Kulasinghe said.
Now the band has traveled everywhere from Bogotá, Columbia, to New York City, in addition to being an Albuquerque staple.
At a show Friday at Low Spirits, a man stumbled onto the dance floor, beer in hand, and yelled “Albuquerque loves you! Don’t stop! Come on boys,” almost spilling beer on Kulasinghe’s violin case.
Each band member had a cup holder attached to his microphone stand to hold beer while performing.
“We used to drink a lot, I used to get wasted,” Kulasinghe said. “It didn’t particularly help or hurt. There’s a point. One or two drinks or even three is fine, and it depends on the crowd, too. If the crowd is getting wasted, then you might as well get wasted, too, because you’re staying on par with the nuttiness.”
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
Sandlin said he gets the brunt of audience interaction because he is at the center of the stage and people often trip and fall on him while dancing.
“Wedding antics are really fun sometimes,” Sandlin said. “Well-dressed women drunkenly fall and expose their panties.”
The band members joke with each other constantly, and have no shame describing some of their antics.
“Somebody in the band pooped their pants,” Kulasinghe said. “We’ll just leave it up to everyone’s imagination to figure out who. I think it was just a loose cannon. It was horrible. It was preshow, but that band member had to go through the show with poo in their pants.”
Kulasinghe said the band plays all types of gigs, from weddings to international jazz festivals to small bars like Low Spirits.
The band performs a mixture of original songs, gypsy swing songs and jazzy arrangements of more modern songs such as Paula Abdul’s “Straight Up.”
Kulasinghe writes his own material, and took undergraduate music theory classes as well as graduate classes in anthropology with a focus on native Sri Lankan music at UNM. But it was difficult for him to focus on school and maintain a career as a working musician.
“I was up way too late way too many nights drinking and hanging out and playing shows, it was really hard to motivate to get however many pages of reading done,” he said. “It was really hard, but I’ve found that almost all of it has been really helpful. It’s taken like six or seven years for that stuff to percolate down into my playing.”
Kulasinghe said he can’t always write songs, but when he does they come out whole with words and a melody.
“It’s really unfortunate, I kind of have to either be in love or some sort of really emotional turmoil to be able to write, it’s kind of problematic,” he said.
His first songs were about heartbreak, and he has also written some incomplete songs about the civil war in Sri Lanka, where his parents are from.
“Most of my stuff comes out sounding like it’s 50 or 60 or 70 years old, and that’s fine,” he said.
