Manasota Music Scene: Ari and the Alibis

It's Saturday night, and despite a cover charge and it being the dog days of September, every table is full at Ace's Lounge in West Bradenton, where Sarasota-based Ari and the Alibis are about to kick off their 9 p.m. show. It's a hot ticket on the sleepy side of town, and when the band strikes up no one's looking anywhere but the stage. The Alibis don't do background music.

Their sound is decidedly not the all-too-common, pleasant-enough-to-listen-to thread that sends you home hard-pressed to cite a single song you heard. There aren't all that many covers, and the ones you'll hear aren't from the standard cover-band repertoire. This band puts on a show in the true sense of the term, sending you home with a head full of riffs you can't shake, haunted by the soulful sounds of a sultry songstress whose stage presence equals her significant vocal chops.

Ari, a homegrown, lithesome and lively blonde in her late twenties, doesn't cut a physical image that suggests the rich and full voice that comes belting out of someplace just past the diaphragm. Her fiancee, New Yorker Nicolaas Kraster, puts down the stern and solid guitar riffs (which are sometimes dropped via a custom-made electric flamenco guitar) over the dutiful bass line of Orlando-based David Whitaker, who meshes well with rock drummer Dave Stark.

For a moment, you're unsure what kind of music you're in for because there's a trombone on stage–a lone horn section that seems a bit out of place, but only until Sarasota's James DaBone supplies the secret ingredient that ties the mish-mash of influences and sounds that is the Alibis into a coherent brew that still defies categorization.

Jazz-Funk-Blues fusion? I suggest when the band says they can't figure out a genre description to market themselves under? Sure, why not? is the collective answer from the group during a break on Ace's side porch between sets.

Kraster, whose parents were in a band that flirted with big-time success decades earlier, started out with the normal '80's-'90's guitar rock influences that you'd expect of a white kid growing up in upstate New York at the time. Somewhere along the way, he took to the challenge of Spanish guitar and mastered the whole flamenco thing, which took him all over the world playing on nylon strings without a pick.

Intrigued by the emerging world music scene that was burgeoning around the turn of the millennium, Kraster founded Cabal, a notable Sarasota band that saw some success in a variety of countries on multiple continents, before morphing into Lotus Fire, another world music gig with a similar groove. The instrumental act was big on the local scene, ultimately becoming something of a house band at the now defunct club, Ceviche, in downtown SRQ.

At some point, Kraster got obsessed with adding a singer and it only took a few notes from Ari (Arianna McManus) while she was sitting in with a band at Mattison's City Grille to know he'd found the one he wanted.

"We'd known each other as acquaintances,“ said Kraster, "you know, being in the same downtown crowd, but when I heard Ari (who's fluent in Spanish) singing Bese Me Mucho that night, it was just like, 'I've got to have her sing in my band'.“

A Booker High product, McManus, came to music, or at least live performances, somewhat accidentally. Getting on stage and sitting in for a few songs in a set led to part-time gigs from a number of bands who wanted an occasional female vocalist for some of their songs.

"I'd never thought about singing professionally,“ explains McManus. "Then all of a sudden, someone's like, Hey you think you can sing eight songs for one of our gigs? I'll pay you this much, and I'm like, Yeah, I can do that. Then Nick was like, I want you to sing in my band. I asked him one question, Can I sing songs in Spanish? He said yes, and that was it. The whole thing sort of found me rather than vice versa.“

Ari joined Lotus Fire, where her Spanish and French songs were a natural fit, giving the band a new dimension and more opportunities to play. The couple soon wound up adding a Sunday duo gig on Siesta Key, where both a new audience and artistic ennui pushed them toward trying bluesier offerings like Stormy Monday and Drinkin' Again. McManus discovered a natural hyperdrive in her vocal range that hadn't been kicked into gear with their earlier music and soon the effect carried over to everything she sang.

Fueled by a burst of creative go-juice, the couple went through a series of transitions, eventually re-branding the band, while adding and subtracting transient musicians who wandered in and out between other projects. They were in search of a keyboardist to round out their sound, when, jamming at the 5 O'Clock Club one night, Kraster got into rhythm with DaBone and had an epiphany.

"There were a bunch of us on stage jamming,“ recalls Kraster, "and James and I just kept locking in on the same lines. After the show, we ended up having like a four-hour conversation on the sidewalk out in front of the club. I came home that night and told Ari, 'I know we're looking for a keyboard, but I found this trombone player, and we've got to have him'.“

DaBone's special sauce proved to be an essential element, and in late 2014 the band, which at this time featured prominent local bassist Greg Voorhees and drummer Johnny "Princess“ Walker, put out a CD containing live recordings from a show at the Ale & Witch in St. Pete. The ten tracks featured seven originals and three covers–including fan-favorite Stormy Monday–and managed to capture the raw energy of the group's live performances, while maintaining a crisp, studio-quality sound.

Ari & the Alibis are only now celebrating two years as a unit, and you can tell that the band is at the threshold of fully congealing into the act that their earlier success had suggested. They're starting to gig more regularly in some of the biggest local spots like the Blue Rooster, Ruby's Elixir in St. Pete and even a two-night stand at Orlando's House of Blues later this month followed by an October gig at the Hard Rock in Tampa.

Tonight you can catch them at the Freckled Fin on Bradenton Beach. You can also like Ari and the Alibis on Facebook, and check their website for future shows. The band just activated a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for their first studio album, Dirty Little Secret, for which they are already off to an impressive start, thanks to a loyal and growing fan base. Click here to kick a little in and help a local act make good, and catch them live so that when they hit the big time–a rare, but seemingly inevitable occurrence in this case–you can say you saw them back in their salad days.

Dennis Maley is a political columnist and senior editor for The Bradenton Times, whose regular column runs every Sunday and Thursday. He is also the author of the fictional novel, A Long Road Home. A big fan of the arts, Dennis occasionally reviews local music & theater.