Ancient rituals reply to modern concerns in the music of Ibeyi, the duo of Naomi and Lisa-Kaindé Díaz, who performed on Wednesday night at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. They are twins born in France and steeped in the Cuban heritage of their father, Angá Díaz, who was a leading percussionist in Cuba.
When the sisters were not singing their own thoughts about love, family, responsibility, tenacity and faith, they offered the African-rooted chants devoted to Yoruba deities, the songs that became Santería as West African slaves preserved them in the Caribbean. Ibeyi means “twins” in Yoruba, and the sisters’ own songs often hark back to the modal melodies and voice-and-percussion interplay of the Yoruba chants. Old or new, the sisters keep their music sparse, confident and closely harmonized.
Yoruba roots and all, Ibeyi’s music is also kin to trip-hop. Its songs, mostly written by Lisa-Kaindé, stick to slow tempos and, often, minor keys; they answer worries and sorrows with determined hope. One song, “Yanira,” mourns their elder sister, who died in 2013; handclapping a beat, the duo sang, “We will meet in heaven.” Another equally somber-sounding tune, “River,” seeks to wash away troubles in a baptism, and concludes with a chant to Oshun, a Yoruba goddess of beauty and fertility. Ibeyi also sang a remake of a song by the rapper Jay Electronica, “Better in Tune With the Infinite,” that ponders loneliness and determination.
Even for a duo, Ibeyi sounds deliberately skeletal. Lisa-Kaindé plays keyboards and sings most of the lead vocals; her sustained, forthright voice sometimes allows itself some of Billie Holiday’s sultry flutter. Most of her arrangements use just a few discrete, foundational piano chords to ground the songs in gospel or soul but leave wide-open spaces for the vocals.
Naomi Díaz provides percussion on traditional instruments — the box-shaped cajón, the three batá drums used in Santería — and on a drum sampler.
For “Mama Says” — in which a daughter sees her mother lonely without her man, but resents that her mother is so dependent — Naomi built a beat out of successive taps on the cajón, her knees and her chest followed by a fingersnap. Still, Ibeyi doesn’t scorn electronics; in “Oya,” they built a loop of vocal harmonies to float around them.
Onstage, the sisters’ smiling presence transformed the doleful, austere songs. The bare-bones arrangements were all they needed; their vocal harmonies, accompanied or barely so, were beacons of sharing and solidarity. The music wasn’t about scarcity or travail or renunciation — it was about self-sufficiency, lean and strong.
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