Beginning with a beguine so sunny and festive that the audience was instantly hooked, steel pan drummer Andy Narell unveiled Sakesho, his new French Caribbean-flavored band, at Blues Alley on Wednesday night. Loosely translated, the band's Creole name means "it's gonna be hot," but the concert proved as refreshing as a cool island breeze.

Narell has often explored world beat music, approaching multi-culti sounds from a jazz perspective, but he seemed especially inspired in this setting, playing alongside two virtuoso musicians from Martinique -- pianist Mario Canonge and bass guitarist Michel Alibo -- and Jean-Philippe Fanfant, a drummer from Guadaloupe. The band uses the beguine's infectious rumbalike allure as a touchstone, but the group also embraces calypso beats, two-bar vamplike Afro-Cuban montunos, sophisticated jazz harmonies and extended improvisations.

As a result, charming folk melodies sometimes spilled into free-spirited and intensely percussive solos. Canonge, an animated, Paris-based veteran, kept bouncing off the piano stool in the midst of his joyously hammered improvisations, while Narell used two pan drums to create splashes of multi-hued rhythms and melodic variations fluid enough to evoke the sound of a slightly muffled jazz vibraphone. The New York-bred percussionist may not have been in his true element, but he nonetheless sounded perfectly at home, infusing "Kon Djab Djigidji," "Roule Quadrille" and other tunes with great color and vitality.

Still, there was no overshadowing Fanfant's shuffle beats, clattering accents and complex metric shifts, which fueled the quartet's rambunctious drive; or Alibo's supple six-string bass lines, which occasionally sustained a mood more romantic and subdued.