LOS ANGELES, CA- Question: How can an obscure British funk band become a Gen X icon? Answer: Spike Lee.
If you were a music nerd in the 1990s, unless you were a committed crate digger and chased down every sample in every hip hop song, Cymande was not on your radar screen. That might have changed a little when the band, largely dormant during those years, issued a few compilation albums at the front and back end of the decade. But for me and my friends, it was Spike Lee’s inclusion of the song “Bra [It’s Alright]” in 25th Hour that thrust Cymande into the spotlight of our consciousness.
Now, Spike had actually used the same song in Crooklyn eight years earlier but that was a song on a soundtrack in a movie driven by nostalgia. 25th Hour was different. 25th Hour was our now. A movie about New York only one year post-9/11, hitting deep on so many levels, and populated with characters that defined an aspirational cool: Rosario Dawson and Ed Norton embodied relationship goals – sexy, tough, understated, smart; Barry Pepper as the post-Patrick Bateman alpha male douche; and Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the painfully pathetic third wheel, who we empathize with but cringe at as he wrestles with the temptation of Anna Paquin’s Lolita-esque flirtations.
The narrative peaks when they step into a nightclub to toast Norton the night before he surrenders to police. A twenty-fifth hour of the day. A moment of time they hope to freeze and dilate into eternity to ward off the inevitability of Norton’s fate. Music, movement, emotion, mood. The scene was the embodiment of where so many twenty-somethings in the early aughts were – or wanted to be. An intersection of DJs, dancing, alcohol, and drugs that felt – at least on film – entirely unthreatening to a generation that was raised to fear the world and all its evil vices. Rapture was for the 80s; the 90s were for fear and loathing and malaise, as filtered through the angst of grunge. But the aughts? The 00s welcomed a sense of liberation that was visually and sonically embodied by Spike’s direction and—more importantly—Cymande’s sound.
There are so many reasons to remember this brilliant film but almost everyone I know will point to the nightclub scene. There were elements of the actual plotline in that moment were dark and awkward and transgressive and sad. But the VIBE. The vibe in that space was everything and the vibe is inextricable from and forever defined by the song that tied it together: Cymande’s “Bra [It’s Alright]” When Spike deployed his patented double-dolly shot to show Anna Paquin gliding angelically through a sea of sweating dancing bodies; elevated, ecstatic, and illuminated; her elevation from the terrestrial earth—a surreal effect—was made to feel real precisely because of the now unmistakable sounds of Cymande. As “it’s alright” echoed through the club, the music was part of the light escorting Paquin through the cavernous dark of the bar. As Spike’s direction synced perfectly with the song, one couldn’t help but share the apparent sense of awe reflected in Paquin’s curious smile and the look of wonder in her dilated eyes.
From that moment forward, Cymande was more than music. It was a credential. If hearing “The Message” gave you chills, you’d give the deejay a knowing look, a look of approval akin to a secret handshake. Because those who knew Cymande were serious people. Serious about music, serious about beauty, and serious about the full spectrum of emotion and experience that can be triggered with just three notes of a single bassline.
If that was Cymande almost 30 years after Cymande, what would Cymande be like 20 years after that?
On this particular evening, Boylston Street was popping as downtown’s Bellwether Theater filled to near capacity with the broad mix of souls who braved Friday rush hour to witness what all hoped would be historic performance. And—spoiler alert—it was. With the lights dimmed and the audience rapt, the 9 members of Cymande greeted the crowd with a warm tapestry of sound. The band’s tight horns and crisp percussion were a calling card to anyone who’s had a Cymande album on repeat the last several decades. It was a sound that signaled a journey back through time and space, a journey made immediately concrete in the present moment by the vocal harmony of the lead singer and the guitarist. You recognized the signature of the instruments but when you heard their voices synchronize, you knew … this is Cymande!
When the intro bassline to “Getting It Back” kicked in, it gave me actual physical goosebumps. How many times have I heard a recorded version of that song? 100? 1000? It’s the type of composition so perfect in all its elements that I couldn’t really imagine it sounding better live. Until I heard it live.
In a live performance, Cymande does something that you can’t really do with a studio album. They add an element of chaos and improvisation that weaves so organically into the composition that you can’t imagine it being any other way. It’s jazz in its purest form and highest expression.
It’s beautiful.
So often, when we encounter beauty, it’s a fleeting moment. And once that moment passes, we’re left with a deep longing to relive the experience. But with the passage of time, we either over-romanticize the moment-that-was, or we encounter shadows of doubt that make us question whether our memory of that moment was truly as magnificent as we thought. Beauty is delicate and that fragility begs many questions. Can it be replicated? Can it be sustained? A first kiss, good sex. There are myriad things in life both exquisite and sublime. The uncertainty and attendant anxiety of reproducing the beautiful can be a crushing existential weight, especially upon the artists who birth it. When you’ve harnessed lightning once, can you do it again … and can you do it 50 years later?
In the case of Cymande, the answer is yes.
I don’t want to overindulge in hyperbole but what Cymande has done in 2025, with most members well into their 70s, is nothing less than a rebirth of magic into a world where magic is painfully lacking.
And what’s really bonkers is that they just released a new album, appropriately titled Renascence, and … it’s excellent! They so easily could’ve been pressed by ego to make the new album the focal point of the evening. But they honored us with the classics and seemed to take delight in doing so, which ended up being a win/win because the room was so enchanted by the masterful exposition of the Message-era material that we were more than eager to embrace the selections that they played from the recently-released album. And by juxtaposing the new material against the old, it put into high relief the unimpeachable quality of the new.
Damn. To witness legends live up to the mythological status we bestow upon them in our memories and imaginations. It’s pure inspiration.
For an evening, the clock froze, time stood still, and a stage full of septuagenarian magicians channeled the power of their youth, only now that power was given direction and gravitas by the wisdom of their years. This evening in Los Angeles was Cymande’s 25th Hour—a gift of extra time that they generously shared with all of us.
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