Chico Mann - Collection (2007-2017)

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. "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.

Garcia is the force behind the "Afrobeat freestyle" band Chico Mann, which will perform Thursday at the Eighteenth Street Lounge. 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. The slick electronics, fused with the rhythmic principles of Afrobeat, produce an electro-earthy sound that is simultaneously familiar and entirely new.

Chico 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. 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. "I grew up in the era of disco roller-skating," he adds. "You hear that, too."

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've devoured music since I was little," he says. "Everything influenced me."

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. His mother, a self-taught pianist, was a female radio personality on a New York City Latin music station. His father was a record distributor, specializing in merengue.

Several years after starting piano lessons at 8, Garcia turned into a budding B-boy. His older sister taught him break-dancing moves - Windmills, the Worm - to influential hip-hop artists such as Kurtis Blow, Melle Mel and Eric B., and Rakim. Sullen and rebellious teenage years followed, ushering in bands such as Joy Division, the Smiths and the Dead Kennedys. Garcia taught himself guitar by listening to the protest music of British musician Billy Bragg.

While studying Afro-Cuban music in 1999, he heard Fela Kuti's Afrobeat music for the first time at a party. "I knew I'd never heard it before," concedes Garcia, "but it sounded so familiar, like something I'd always known. His juxtaposition of rhythms with the moody, modal jazz elements is what really blew me away."

Garcia created Chico Mann (and no, it's not a reference to the 1970s sitcom "Chico and the Man," but a line from the 1983 film "Wild Style") in 2005. Although it has gone through several transformations, the rump-shaking, funky music and Garcia's soulful vocals remain a constant.

While Fela Kuti's lyrics were overtly political, Chico Mann's are not. "My music is about being life-affirming," Garcia says. "It's about the dignity of human beings. I feel grateful for the ability, and the freedom, to express that fundamental belief."