Concert Programs 2004

"Backstage" gives you the background and expertise that makes the music and dance CITYFOLK presents come alive in so many dimensions -- historical, societal, musical, personal and emotional. CITYFOLK is fortuante to have music expert and writer Jon Hartley Fox to write these essays.

April 23, 2004 -- Khalid Moss: Jazz Summit
with Gary Bartz, Lewis Nash and Jim Anderson

Sometimes you have to leave home to achieve your dreams. Sometimes you don’t. And sometimes--dreams being how they are--you have to leave to be tested and then return, like a character in some Homeric epic.. That’s the way it’s been for pianist Khalid Moss.

Born in Chicago, Khalid Moss was raised in Dayton. He started playing piano at a young age and played throughout his youth. It was while Moss was studying at Ohio University in Athens that his music really caught fire and he decided to try to make a career out of it. After graduating in 1976, Moss briefly returned to Dayton for what amounted to a post-graduate tutorial in jazz performance.

Moss got a gig playing piano at Gilly’s, then as now the premier jazz club in Dayton. It was an important confidence-builder for the young pianist, as he got the chance to perform with such major jazz players as Sonny Stitt and Rohsaan Roland Kirk. Both Stitt and Kirk encouraged Moss to move to New York, which was where serious jazz musicians went if they wanted to play in the big leagues.

Organist Richard “Groove” Holmes must have been especially encouraging and persuasive, as he convinced Moss to join him on tour, where Moss played three electronic keyboards to complement Holmes’ Hammond B-3 organ. When the tour ended in New York, Moss networked his way to a gig with tenor saxophonist Pharoah Sanders. As a member of Sanders’ band, Moss played such leading New York jazz venues as the Village Vanguard.

The Sanders gig led to a job with Yusef Lateef, another tenor saxophonist. Lateef, who also played flute and oboe, was an early pioneer of what came to be called “world music.” Moss enjoyed his time in this boundary-stretching band, which came to an end in late 1979, when Lateef moved to Africa.

Within a couple of weeks, Moss landed a job with the great jazz vocalist Betty Carter. Moss thought he had worked hard in Lateef’s band, but Carter was a demanding and exacting boss who took hard work to another level. As Moss later recalled in an interview with CITYFOLK’S Dave Barber, “She told me: ‘You think you can play the piano? You’ll be able to play the piano when you leave me.’ We rehearsed two weeks straight for five days a week getting her arrangements down. There were so many things I learned from Betty.”

It was hard work, but it was a great gig. After years of relative obscurity, Carter became a big star in the early 1980s, with top-selling albums showcasing her idiosyncratic singing. She was on a well-deserved roll, and her piano-bass-drums trio played the best clubs and most prestigious festivals. Moss played on Carter’s album Whatever Happened To Love and appeared with her on numerous television programs.

(He is featured in a Carter performance from the Montreal Jazz Festival currently being shown on the Ovation cable arts channel.) The group even played at the White House, as part of a tribute to Lionel Hampton. Moss was living his dream and he was on top of the world.

And then the wheels came off. It started out small--a couple of missed notes here and there. But it got worse, whatever it was. It was as if his talented, highly trained hands had turned against him. Two fingers on Moss’ right hand had suddenly refused to cooperate. Moss would intend to play one note, but those fingers would play another. All the other fingers worked fine, but these two were out of his control. His brain sent one signal, those fingers received another.

Moss was baffled and took his problem to Carter, who fired him. If Moss had not yet learned how difficult the music business could be, he certainly learned it that day. And things got worse from there, as Moss made the rounds looking for an answer to his problem. He tried biofeedback, acupuncture, chiropractors and more, but nothing helped.

He finally received a correct diagnosis: focal distonia, a little understood repetitive-stress ailment. The condition is an equal opportunity career-wrecker that has afflicted such well-known musicians as classical pianists Leon Fleischer and Gary Graffman, bluegrass banjo picker Tom Adams and folk singer and guitarist Utah Phillips. It’s not known what causes it and there is no cure.

A deeply religious man, Moss took the diagnosis hard. “I felt God was punishing me for something,” he recalled. “I got a day job and stayed away from music. I didn’t play jazz and wouldn’t even listen to it.”

Moss eventually found his way back to music and the piano. He had to relearn how to play with his right hand and how to adapt. “Over a period of years, I was able to rebuild my style,” he says. “For a while it was a fight, but I can now play anything I used to play and it sounds like me.”

Moss moved back to Dayton in 1992 and the pieces of his life have gradually fallen into place. He’s again performing, composing and arranging. Moss is also an award-winning religion writer for the Dayton Daily News and a contributing correspondent for Down Beat, the Kansas City Gazette and BET Weekend Magazine. Moss is an adjunct professor of music at the University of Dayton, as well as the artistic director for the Dayton Art Institute’s “Just Jazz” concert series and the long running, annual “Women in Jazz Festival” in downtown Dayton.

For tonight’s “Jazz Summit,” Moss has invited three old friends and musical associates--Gary Bartz, Lewis Nash and Jim Anderson--to join him for a one-time-only jazz concert that should be quite memorable.

Alto saxophonist Gary Bartz was hailed as a major new talent when he exploded on the jazz scene in the middle 1960s. The Baltimore native, who studied at Juilliard and the Peabody Conservatory, first gained a national reputation playing with the Max Roach–Abbey Lincoln group. He then worked with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and in the bands of McCoy Tyner and Blue Mitchell. By 1970, Bartz was working with Miles Davis, and was prominently featured on Davis’ milestone album Live: Evil, a controversial record that helped launch the “jazz fusion” movement of the 1970s. For several years starting in the early 1970s, Bartz led his own highly innovative band, the politically charged Ntu Troop. Critic Gary Giddins has described Bartz’ playing as “brainy and flamboyant [with] a gritty, swinging lucidity that could make you soar.”

Bartz has recorded prolifically throughout his career, both as a sideman for such musicians as Kenny Burrell, Roy Hargrove and Woody Shaw and as a leader. He recorded for Milestone and Prestige early in his career; since the late 1980s, Bartz has made several fine albums for such specialist labels as SteepleChase, Mapleshade and Candid. His masterpiece is the 1974 double-album I’ve Known Rivers and Other Bodies, recorded live at the Montreux Jazz Festival. In addition to leading his own bands, he joins the classic postbop quartet Sphere semi-regularly (they performed here on the CITYFOLK Jazz Series in the fall of 1998), replacing founding member, the late tenor saxist Charlie Rouse.

Lewis Nash is the drummer of choice for jazz legends, the music’s young lions and best-selling pop acts. A native of Phoenix, Nash moved to New York in 1981 and worked with Betty Carter for almost four years. He followed that experience with stints in the bands of bassist Ron Carter, saxophonists Branford Marsalis and Sonny Rollins and the Don Pullen-George Adams Quartet. Nash spent the 1990s as a member of the Tommy Flanagan Trio, appearing on seven recordings by the renowned pianist.

Nash has played on more than 300 albums by a diverse group of musicians that includes Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson, Joe Lovano, Diana Krall, Branford Marsalis, Bette Midler and Natalie Cole. Nash has one album as a leader, Rhythm is My Business. He has also toured and recorded with the Newport Festival All-Stars, Carnegie Hall Jazz Band and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. Nash is on the jazz studies faculty at The Juilliard School in New York.

Bassist Jim Anderson has been a vital part of the Cincinnati jazz scene for over thirty- five years. Co-founder of one of the Queen City’s most durable and creative bands, the Cohesion Jazz Ensemble, he has been active in a variety of roles: performer, composer, teacher and bandleader. He has taught in the Jazz Studies Program at the College Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati. Along with being showcased with leading nationally-known musicians in the Cincinnati-Dayton area, he has been visible on the recordings of some our region’s finest musicians, including singer Bill Caffie’s 2002 record “Leavin’ This Old Town” and drummer Art Gore’s “Art Work”, which also features Gary Bartz.

Since returning to Dayton, Khalid Moss has kept busy with a number of projects. One of those endeavors is Standard Time, a southwestern Ohio jazz group that features trumpeter Michael Wade. Moss co-founded the band, which recorded several of his tunes on its CD Be Truthful. Moss can also be heard on the album J-Curve Cincinnati Jazz Collection, Vol. II, as well as on recordings by Betty Carter, Richard “Groove” Holmes, Milt Jackson, Gary Bartz and Pharoah Sanders.

Esteemed jazz critic and historian Leonard Feather once called Moss’ music “rather amazing,” writing “I have never heard Khalid Moss play an unmusical note. He seems to have an innate sense of form, structure, time and melodic integrity. He is definitely a talent deserving of much wider recognition.”

That’s as true today as when Feather wrote it. Whether that wider recognition comes or not, Khalid Moss is happy and finally at peace. He went to New York and found success and acclaim. For fulfillment, he had to come home.

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April 10, 2004 -- The Battlefield Band

Thirty-five years ago, four young Scottish musicians sat around a Glasgow table, drinking beers and talking about, what else, music. As the discussion and pints flowed into the night, the young men did what young musicians do in such a situation--they decided to form a band. In a time-honored tradition, the four chose to name their new band after their hometown, Battlefield, a Glasgow suburb.

That first version of the Battlefield Band included Alan Reid and Brian McNeill, both of whom would be mainstays of the group in the first few years. The band, which practiced for a year before landing its first pub gig, did not play traditional Scottish music at the time, but instead a mélange of acoustic music from a variety of sources. It wasn’t until the band played an early gig in England--where the audience expected Scottish musicians to play Scottish music--that the members decided to focus on traditional music.

There were a few vocal groups in Scotland performing traditional material, but instrumental music was largely unexplored territory. Inspired by the experimental folk-based music being played by such Irish bands as Planxty and the Bothy Band, the Battlefield Band decided to apply the same approach to the music of Scotland.

From the start, the band emphasized a unique fusion of old and new--traditional tunes and songs alongside new material written by the band members; and traditional instruments such as the flute, bagpipes, fiddle and cittern mixing with instruments that were decidedly more modern: guitar, synthesizer and bass guitar. The band began recording in 1976, though “began recording” might be a bit of an understatement.

As Alan Reid puts it, “We went recording crazy. We did four albums in twenty-three months.” The first album, featuring the trio of Reid, McNeill and Ricky Starr, was Battlefield Band: Scottish Folk, released in 1976. Starr was soon replaced by bouzouki player Jamie McMenamy and whistle player John Gahagan. That quartet then recorded two albums for two different labels in two different countries, both of them released as The Battlefield Band. The album on Escalibur is especially significant, as that was the first Battlefield album to showcase Scotland’s national instrument, the bagpipes.

Oddly enough, the addition of the pipes met with some resistance, as did, more predictably, Reid’s growing fascination with electronic keyboards. “When I first used synthesizer,” says Reid, “some in Scotland didn’t like the idea of it. But for every one of those who muttered behind my back, 10 or 15 people would say, ‘This is amazing.’ Bagpipes in a Celtic band were not known at that time either. We weren’t the first to use bagpipes, but the first to record with them. Since 1979 we’ve basically had the same sound. Having all this heavy artillery made us feel like a heavy metal band. I always feel musicians should use what is available, whether it’s a sheep’s belly or a synthesizer.”

Gahagan was replaced in 1977 by Pat Kilbride, who stuck around just long enough to be featured prominently on the band’s fourth album, At The Front, widely recognized today as a modern Celtic masterpiece. About this time, the band members started writing songs and tunes; this original material now constitutes a sizable part of the band’s repertoire.

The Battlefield Band consolidated its strengths during the remainder of the 1970s and throughout the 1980s, creating a signature band sound built around what Reid calls the “heavy artillery,” the Highland pipes and Reid’s synthesizer. Reid had started out playing pedal organs in the band, but they were fragile and not tremendously portable. As soon as the electronic synthesizer became affordable enough and practical enough to use on the road, Reid embraced the synthesizer and has played one since.

By the 1980s, the Battlefield Band was recognized as one of the leading Celtic bands, and probably the most important one when it came to exploring the Scottish musical heritage. As Billboard explained, “What the internationally renowned Irish band, the Chieftains, has done for traditional Irish music, Battlefield Band is doing for the music of Scotland.” The Edinburgh Evening News hails the band as “a national treasure [that] exemplifies the ongoing nature of Scottish musical tradition.”

Eschewing the crossover strategy and high-profile collaborations that have worked so well for the Chieftains, the Battlefield Band has followed a different path--one Mojo characterizes as “no tricks, no gimmicks, just very fine music.” The most remarkable aspect of the band’s success is its longevity.

Alan Reid is the only original member still with the band, and the Battlefield Band can be seen in part as a monument to Reid’s tenacity and enduring musical vision. His genius has been in seamlessly fitting new members into the band’s sound while simultaneously subtly changing that sound to reflect the unique talents of the new members.

The current band is comprised of Alan Reid (keyboards, guitar and vocals), Pat Kilbride (guitar, cittern and vocals), Alasdair White (fiddle, whistle, banjo, bouzouki, Highland pipes, small pipes and bodhran) and Mike Katz (Highland pipes, small pipes, whistles and bass guitar). The honor roll of those who have previously served in the Battlefield Band includes such outstanding musicians and singers as John McCusker, Ged Foley, Alistair Russell, Iain MacDonald and Davy Steele, who died in 2001.

This is the second hitch in the Battlefield Band for Kilbride, the band’s first and only Irish member. Kilbride rejoined the band in 2002 after a twenty-some-year hiatus, during which he performed as a solo act and worked with the New York-based Kips Bay Ceili Band. Piper Mike Katz, a veteran of the Scottish group Ceolbeg, joined the Battlefield Band in 1997. Don’t be misled by his non-Gaelic surname. Katz has deep family roots in County Cuyahoga, an industrial region in the far northwestern corner of, well, Ohio. The band’s youngest member is teenaged multi-instrumentalist Alasdair White from the island of Lewis, one of the Gaelic-speaking Outer Hebrides.

Touring under the motto “Forward With Scotland’s Past,” the Battlefield Band has performed all over the world, including appearances in Germany, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Syria, Jordan, India, Egypt, Canada, the U.K. and the U.S. The band has recorded extensively as well. Not counting solo projects or compilations, the band’s discography now includes more than twenty albums. The most recent is Out for the Night, released in January.

Despite the personnel changes, the sound of the Battlefield Band has been amazingly consistent. “Every time you have a change,” says Reid, “hopefully it brings something fresh. From a musical point of view it is fresh, it’s different, and it keeps you on your toes. It’s a lot of hard work…but you do get a lot of energy.”

That’s good, because the Battlefield Band burns a lot of energy in a typical performance. Reid and Kilbride do most of the lead singing, on a collection of songs ranging from ancient to newly written. Several of the band’s original songs have become modern classics, so they’ll be sprinkled throughout a show. White and Katz will tear through a couple of blistering fiddle-bagpipe duets. There will be several exceptionally well-crafted sets of tunes in which all four instrumentalists display their considerable chops on dance tunes, reels, old-fashioned waltzes, airs and more.

True to the Battlefield way, this version of the band reflects the individual strengths of the four members. The band is both more guitar-oriented and Irish-influenced than past groupings, logical in that Kilbride is Irish and a magnificent guitarist. White’s fiddling also has a bit more of an Irish feel than that of his predecessors. Again, credit geography--White’s homefolks in the western islands of Scotland have much in common with the Gaelic-speaking Irish.

Unlike, say, the Rolling Stones, the Battlefield Band shows little signs of its three and a half decades as a band. The group puts on a great show--it won “Best Live Act” at the 2003 Scots Traditional Music Awards--and, if the smiles on the band members’ faces are any kind of indication, the guys have a great time on stage. Perhaps that helps to explain the band’s extraordinary longevity.

After thirty-five years at the helm of the Battlefield Band, arguably the most important Scottish band of the Celtic folk revival, Alan Reid probably has bad habits older than his fiddling bandmate Alasdair White. Reid and the band have had an up-and-down journey. The band has come close to packing it in on a few occasions and Reid must have wondered at times if it was all worth it. Or maybe he didn’t.

Alasdair White, with the exuberance of youth, was going on one day about life in the Battlefield Band. He was excited by it all--the concerts, the traveling, the albums, the sound-checks and everything else. It was all good and it was all one hell of a lot of fun.

“That’s the danger, Alasdair,” Reid sagely cautioned the young string wizard. “Once you’ve done this, you can never go work in a bank.”

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March 19, 2004 -- Ray Vega Sextet

Tonight's concert featuring trumpeter Ray Vega and his Sextet concludes an extensive, three-week residency involving students of all ages from throughout the Miami Valley region. Over the past five days, all of the members of his group have joined him at our schools. A story that has been told to students more than once ofver the past three weeks involves Ray's introduction to the trumpet. He had wanted to play the alto saxophone. But that day in the junior high school band room, when it was time for the students to choose an instrument to study and play in the band, there weren’t enough saxophones to go around. His choice was trumpet or trombone. Ray really wanted to play the saxophone, but kids at his South Bronx school learned to make do with what was available. He chose the trumpet.

Things started to click for Vega trumpet-wise when his mother gave him a Freddie Hubbard album in 1976. The teenager consumed the works of the popular trumpeter (especially Hubbard’s albums High Energy and The Body and The Soul) and he was on his way.

Ray’s parents were from Puerto Rico but they had moved to the South Bronx, where he was born and raised. Vega grew up immersed in two vital, exciting New York music scenes, jazz and salsa. The early lack of saxophone aside, Vega actually received a first-rate musical education within the New York City public school system, with training in theory, improvisation, harmony, and on his instrument. He attended the renowned High School of Music and Arts in New York and, after graduation, continued his studies at Long Island University on a music scholarship.

Vega first made a name for himself playing around New York in the salsa and Latin jazz bands of such greats as Ray Barretto, Mongo Santamaria, Tito Nieves, Mario Bauza, Luis “Perico” Ortiz and Johnny Pacheco. He reached the pinnacle when he joined the band of legendary percussionist Tito Puente, universally revered as “the King of Latin Jazz.” As the lead trumpeter in Puente’s Latin Jazz Orchestra for the last six years of Puente’s life, Vega toured and recorded extensively; he can be heard on Puente’s Grammy-winning album Mambo Birdland, among many others.

At the same time he was playing with the greats of Latin music in New York , Vega was establishing himself as a creative, imaginative player within the mainstream jazz world. Vega has been a sideman on numerous jazz sessions, played alongside Dizzy Gillespie, played on Joe Henderson’s Grammy-winning album The Joe Henderson Big Band and worked with fellow trumpeter Nicholas Payton on Payton’s Louis Armstrong Centennial Celebration tour and recording. He also started his own band, gradually developing his sound at a weekly club gig.

Vega views it as something of a personal mission to see that “Latin jazz” honors both halves of its name. To his ears, too much of the music is pretty good on the Latin side, but not so good on the jazz half. “We have to respect both ends of the equation,” he says. “When I consider Latin jazz, I must pay my respect to the Latin side of the music, rhythmically speaking. But the word ‘jazz’ carries a lot of weight, because there are so many incredible masters of this American music. So when I think of Latin jazz, I think of connecting the two genres--and being creative about it.

“My thing is maneuvering around the Latin rhythms, but also being well-schooled in the language of Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, and other masters. I’m trying to deliver a combination of both things. It’s a jazz aesthetic with a Latin thing under it.”

Vega first recorded as a leader in the mid-1990s on Ray Vega, released by Concord Picante. The album garnered good reviews and radio airplay and started a Ray Vega buzz outside the greater New York area. Cadence called Vega “an accomplished and graceful bop-oriented trumpeter,” while numerous other critics also praised Vega’s writing and arranging skills. Allaboutjazz.com heard in Vega’s playing “the crisp intelligent delivery of Freddie Hubbard, the passionate fortitude of Kenny Dorham, the clean precision of Woody Shaw, and the romantic depth of Chet Baker and Art Farmer.”

Vega’s second album, also on Concord Picante, is Boperation, a wide-ranging homage to a dozen great jazz trumpeters--from Fats Navarro to Clifford Brown to Miles Davis to Donald Byrd to, yes, Freddie Hubbard. “Hub-Tones,” the opening cut on Boperation, is a brilliantly played tribute to Hubbard in which Vega pays a youngster’s debt to his first mentor. The Boston Globe was among the many publications that found the album quite satisfying: “Whether on trumpet or flugelhorn, which he plays with equal dexterity, [Vega] featured a sound that is bolder than that of many jazz horns, yet avoided the insistent upper-register flights that are the norm among Latin players.”

His third album was Pa’lante. It was Vega’s debut on a new record label, Palmetto, as well as his first recording to feature the Ray Vega Latin Jazz Sextet:Bobby Porcelli (alto saxophone), Igor Atalita (piano), Boris Kozlov (bass),Willie Martinez (drums, timbales) and Wilson “Chembo” Corniel (congas). The outstanding album earned the ultimate compliment from La Prensa, “Ray Vega is Latin Jazz.”

The weekly club gigs have allowed Vega to keep a working group together, something of a rarity these days. The Ray Vega Latin Jazz Sextet has performed across the U.S.; at major jazz festivals in this country as well as in Switzerland and Puerto Rico; in Spain and the British Virgin Islands; at the U.S. Open in 2002; on two recent tours of Europe; and at three concerts in Beirut , Lebanon, sponsored by the American Embassy.

With his fiery and original fusion of Latin rhythms and jazz repertoire and technique, Vega has emerged as a leader of a new generation of Latin jazz players, a generation that is more broadly, well, Latin. “For a very long time,” says Vega, “Latin jazz was either based on Cuban music or Brazilian music. There is a new wave of artists from Central and South America and the Caribbean--Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic--bringing new rhythmical elements of their music to Latin jazz.”

Vega’s most recent recording, Squeeze, Squeeze, was released in January. The album introduced two new members of the Sextet: bassist Gregg August and drummer Adam Weber. Vega describes the sound on the new album as “Latin bop,” and critics are already lining up to praise this album as the best and most assured of Vega’s career.

According to allaboutjazz.com, “Trumpeter Ray Vega is a triumphant example of a musician liberated rather than straightjacketed by his Latin jazz expertise...The title tune, one of four original compositions by Vega, is a tour de force of various Latin dance styles weaving in and out of a funky bop theme. It evokes a street carnival atmosphere, a spontaneous joy that permeates this adventuresome session.”

Like a surprising number of today’s major jazz players, Ray Vega is a committed and accomplished educator. Vega is an extremely knowledgeable student of the music on “both ends of the Latin jazz equation,” and he shares his knowledge in a variety of ways. He is currently a professor at the music conservatory of the State University of New York, Purchase (where he joins, by the way, a pretty hip faculty that includes musicians Jon Faddis, John Abercrombie, Jim Pugh and Jim Potondi). Besides offering instruction on the trumpet and flugelhorn, Vega coaches a small student ensemble and conducts the Purchase Latin Jazz Orchestra.

Ray Vega told a journalist a couple of years ago that his general plan of action was pretty simple: “Taking my life and music forward and always being aware of the masters that paved the way.” That’s an approach we all could live by, as well as a solid foundation for an educational philosophy that’s worth teaching to students.

Vega never did get to play the alto sax, but the trumpet has worked out pretty well for him. He’s a respected musician, he’s making a living playing music, he’s passing on his love and knowledge of music to the next generation and he’s raising his family. “I’m the happiest man in the world right now,” says Ray Vega. “As far as I’m concerned, I’m the only trumpet player in New York City that’s leading his own Latin jazz group--aggressively--and pursuing nothing but that. And I’m having a great time.”

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Jane Bunnett's love affair with Cuban music started in 1982 with her search for a cheap vacation spot. The acclaimed Canadian saxophonist and her husband, trumpeter Larry Cramer, were looking to escape the cold Toronto winter and Cuba was warm, relatively close and relatively inexpensive. Before the end of that first vacation, Bunnett had discovered that Cuba had much more to offer her than nice weather and low prices.

Bunnett and Cramer found that, despite the grinding poverty that is so pervasive on the island, Cuba is a country full of music and musicians -- a place where, in Bunnett's words, "music just seemed to be everywhere." Bunnett and Cramer played with the local musicians and bands as much as they could, and the rich traditions of Cuban music thoroughly enchanted the couple. The island has figured prominently in their music since then.

Back in Canada, Bunnett set about immersing herself in a study of the many forms and styles of Cuban music. Bunnett's musical training had started with classical training on the piano and clarinet as a child, and, later, she had studied piano and soprano saxophone with jazz artists Barry Harris and Steve Lacy. She's self-taught on the flute. Bunnett made her recording debut in 1989 with an album with pianist Don Pullen, New York Duets. She followed that with Live at Sweet Basil , a recording of her quintet performing live at a club during the Greenwich Village Jazz Festival in New York. These two albums earned Bunnett a reputation as a fast-rising talent with chops and technique to spare.

It was Bunnett's third album, however, that first displayed her love of Cuban music and her impressive grasp of its component styles. Spirits of Havana, a blend of jazz and the folkloric Yoruban roots of Cuban music, was critically acclaimed and won Bunnett her first Juno Award (Canada's equivalent to the Grammy). The saxophonist was forging her own unique Anglo-Afro-Cuban synthesis, and the experiments on this album led directly to such follow-ups as Jane Bunnett and The Cuban Piano Masters ; Havana Flute Summit; Ritmo + Soul ; Alma de Santiago and, most recently, Cuban Odyssey.

Since the release of Spirits of Havana , Bunnett has led something of a double existence. She maintains an active presence in the mainstream jazz world, performing at leading festivals and playing and recording with such top-tier jazz musicians as saxophonist Dewey Redman; pianists Don Pullen, Paul Bley and Stanley Cowell; bassist Charlie Haden; drummer Billy Hart; and singers Sheila Jordan and Jeanne Lee, among others.

At the same time, Bunnett continues to dig deeper into the roots of Cuban music. For Bunnett, jazz and Cuban music are not two different things, but more like two sides of the same coin. "I see myself as a jazz musician," she says, "but I'm working in this traditional Cuban music. I'm not working with salsa. I'm not trying to present music that is dance-oriented for pop audiences. Larry and I have always worked with traditional Cuban song-forms and styles."

Her collaborations with Cuban musicians over the past twenty years have given Bunnett a singular perspective on the music. "I think we've covered a lot of musical ground in Cuba over the years," she says. "From originally working with Merceditas Valdes and Grupo Yoruba Andabo and other folkloric groups, like Clave y Guaguanco...to working with Jose Maria Vitier and Frank Emilio, the Cuban piano masters...to playing the son music of Los Naranjos."

Those various musical streams came together beautifully on Bunnett's 2002 CD, Cuban Odyssey. It's a stunning album -- bold, ambitious and brilliantly executed. Inspired by a Cuban visit in 2000 in which Bunnett and Cramer traveled for the first time in the rural parts of the island, Cuban Odyssey is world music that honors all of its parts. The CD was named "Best World Album" at the 2003 Urban Music Awards and "Best Latin Jazz Album" at the 2003 Jazz Journalists Awards. It is nominated for a Grammy Award as the year's "Best Latin Jazz Album"

Bunnett and Cramer have now made dozens of trips to Cuba, but the one that led to the acclaimed CD was special for two reasons. On previous visits, the couple had limited their musical activities to the cities of Havana and Santiago de Cuba. This time, they went into the countryside -- to Matanzas, Cienfuegos and Camaguey -- and met and played with a new group of bands and musicians.

According to Bunnett, though, the challenge was the same. "You have to integrate yourself within another musical context," she says, "to fit in and express yourself musically and honestly within that idiom. We wanted to tie a thread through all of our experiences with the musics of Cuba. I think with this project it really happened."

Second, this visit was documented in the award-winning film Jane Bunnett/Spirits Of Havana: Cuban Odyssey (which CITYFOLK screened at Neon Movies on January 4). The two musicians were accompanied on their travels by a video crew from the National Film Board of Canada, and as Bunnett and Cramer drove around the island, the crew captured them in a series of fascinating musical collaborations with a variety of local musicians as well as such groups as Los Munequitos de Matanzas, Los Naranjos and Desandann. The documentary, which premiered at the Montreal World Film Festival in 2000, is now available on DVD.  

Bunnett's multi-cultural music making has met with widespread critical acclaim. New Jazz Review praises her for "blending a panoramic approach to Cuban folkloric traditions and the fire of American jazz. Jane Bunnett has carved out a unique place in the pantheon of current Caribbean music." Allaboutjazz noted her ability "to fire up the afterburners to ignite a program that's sure to satisfy jazz lovers the world over."

Jane Bunnett appears tonight at the Dayton Art Institute with her six-piece touring band, Spirits of Havana. The award-winning sextet includes Jane Bunnett (soprano saxophone, flute), Larry Cramer (trumpet),Elio Villafranca (piano), Kieran Overs (bass), Francisco Mela (drums) and Alberto Alberto (percussion, lead vocals).

Keep your eye on pianist Elio Villafranca. The fiery young Cuban-born pianist, a member of the jazz-heavy faculty of the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, has already earned comparisons with such Cuban piano masters as Chucho Valdes and Gonzálo Rubalcaba. Villafranca's most recent recording, Incantations (Encantaciones) , featuring Jane Bunnett, Pat Martino and Terrell Stafford, appeared on many critics' "best of the year" lists for 2003.

Since her 1989 debut, Bunnett has recorded extensively, collaborating both with American jazz players and Cuban musicians. Her discography includes the albums Cuban Odyssey; Spirituals and Dedications ; Alma de Santiago; Ritmo + Soul; Chamalongo ; Havana Flute Summit; Jane Bunnett and The Cuban Piano Masters ; Rendez-Vous Brazil Cuba; Double Time (a duet album with Paul Bley); The Water is Wide; Spirits of Havana; Live at Sweet Basil; and New York Duets (a duet album with Don Pullen).

In a review of the Cuban Odyssey CD in Africana, Willard Jenkins addresses head-on the issue of a white Canadian woman playing Afro-Cuban jazz. "Let's be perfectly clear," writes Jenkins. "Jane Bunnett is not a musical colonizer seeking exotic ethnic trappings to decorate her music. Her immersion in Cuban music has come from the heart and it has been profound...Bunnett gently and respectfully interacts on flute and soprano sax, digging deep into the music with an exceptional grit and surety of tone. One gets the overall feeling of a great sense of selflessness and dignity in Bunnett's music." 

The Cuban music bandwagon has been pretty full in the years since Ry Cooder and the Buena Vista Social Club put the music back in the spotlight. But Bunnett has been investigating the musical linkages and cultural connections in Afro-Cuban jazz for more than 20 years. She has done the work. She has paid her dues. She has befriended and supported countless Cuban musicians, hosted them on North American tours and helped to arrange recording sessions for them. Official recognition of her many contributions came in 2002, when the Smithsonian Institution honored Jane Bunnett for her lifetime of dedication to the enrichment and diffusion of Latin music."

It's truly amazing how travel can broaden one's horizons. Twenty-five years ago, Jane Bunnett was a talented Canadian saxophone player. Today, she leads one of the hottest Afro-Cuban jazz bands outside of Cuba, with a mantel full of awards and more to come in the future. Best of all, she's earned the respect and trust of the Cuban musicians with whom she's worked -- they see Jane Bunnett as a peer, an equal, a fine musician and a better friend. 

Renowned Cuban saxophonist Paquito D'Rivera is a long-time supporter and fan of Bunnett's musical efforts. In a recent interview in Jazz Times, D'Rivera spoke for many of his countrymen when he said, "Jane is brilliant and she's been paying so much respect to our music. She's been trying so hard to play the real thing. What she's doing is valid and legit. She uses the real ingredients."

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November 14, 2003 -- Gao Hong & Chen Tao

When virtuoso musician Gao Hong was a young girl in China, her mother took her to see a fortune-teller. This was at the height of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution and the nation seemed locked in the grip of chaos. Gao’s father, a landowner and minor government official, had been taken from the family by the Red Guard, branded a “reactionary” and sent to a rural commune for what was called “re-education.” It was an unsettled and frightening time in China and Gao’s mother wanted some old-fashioned reassurance about her twelve-year-old daughter’s future.

The elderly fortune-teller studied the young girl and said Hong would be “a flying dragon, always traveling.” As a result, she would always have to “make her home in her heart.” No matter how one feels about such things, it’s worth noting that the fortune-teller turned out to be right on both counts.

Gao Hong began her career as a professional musician later that year. She was a prodigy on the pipa, a four-stringed, fretted, pear-shaped lute introduced to China during the Han Dynasty, sometime between 200 B.C. and 200 A.D. A highly intricate solo style of playing the pipa evolved and the instrument became the main source of entertainment at banquets and other official functions of the imperial court.

Gao, whose family lived in the city of Luoyang, began playing the pipa at age eight, taught at first by her mother. When she showed an unusual aptitude on the instrument, Gao’s mother decided that a career as a professional musician might offer her daughter her best chance at making it safely through the Cultural Revolution.

To that end, Gao began taking lessons at age ten. Thanks to natural talent and practicing eight or more hours a day, Gao made rapid progress on the instrument. At twelve, she left home and moved 400 miles away to Hebei Province to join a traveling song-and-dance troupe. She was the youngest member of the ensemble (her roommates were two women in their mid-20s) and it was a tough life for a homesick girl, as the provincial troupe traveled throughout north central China playing in rural areas wherever an audience could be found. She stuck it out for three years and grew immensely as a musician.

She was known within the troupe for an exceptionally strong work ethic. She rose each morning at 3:30 for two hours of private practice in her building’s furnace room. It was dank and dirty, but it was the only place she could play without disturbing anyone. When she would emerge from the furnace room to join her troupe-mates for breakfast, her face would invariably be smeared with soot. The older members of the ensemble, who formed a sort of surrogate family for the lonely girl, took to calling Gao their “little black kitten.”

Gao Hong went back to school in 1979. Despite the three-year gap in her education, Gao passed the entrance examination and was admitted to Hebei Provincial School for the Arts, one of the best such schools in China. She studied here for several years, continuing to perform as much as she could. In 1984, she won First Prize in the Hebei Professional Young Music Performers Competition.

Two years later, she entered China’s most prestigious music school, the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. One of only two pipa players admitted to the Conservatory that year, Hong studied with Lin Shicheng, the sole living master of the difficult Pudong style of playing, which is known for distinctive string-bending and a highly emotional feel. Hong graduated with honors from the Central Conservatory of Music and, in 1990, won an International Art Cup in Beijing.

After she finished school, Hong took a job with the Beijing Song and Dance Troupe as the ensemble’s first-chair pipa player. This group toured extensively within China and even performed in Japan, which led to an invitation for Hong to return to Japan as a solo performer. That led to an extended stay in Tokyo for Hong, for several months of comparative study of the pipa and the Japanese biwa. And that led to a renewed acquaintance with an American musician and composer she had met earlier in Beijing, Paul Dice.

Dice was so impressed by Hong’s music, he offered to organize her first tour of the United States, a ten-city jaunt in 1994 that included performances in New York and Minneapolis. As it developed, Dice was also pretty impressed with Hong herself (and she with him). The couple was married that same year and settled in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.

Since moving to the United States in the mid-1990s, Hong has earned a reputation as a tireless and enthusiastic educator. She has taught at MacPhail Center for the Arts and Metropolitan State University in Minnesota and as a guest lecturer at numerous colleges and universities throughout the country.

Hong has also expanded the horizons for her ancient instrument. In traditional Chinese music, compositions for the pipa are generally classified as either wenqu, civil pieces, or wuqu, martial pieces. Civil pieces are usually played at a slow tempo and low volume, aiming for a refined elegance. Martial pieces, which often commemorate famous battles in Chinese history, are, as one might expect, faster and louder.

Those traditional compositions form the core of her repertoire and musical sensibility. That sensibility, however, is also shaped by the fact that Hong is a cosmopolitan world traveler who has performed throughout Europe, Japan, Australia, China and the U.S., playing music with musicians from many different cultures. Her playing has been influenced, for one example, by the jazz musicians she plays with in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Hong has taken the pipa into uncharted performance territory. Besides playing solo, in a duet with Chen Tao or with the Chinese music ensemble Spirit of Nature, Hong also finds time to perform with the multicultural groups Speaking In Tongues and Blended Cultures Ensemble. She has appeared at major festivals and concert halls worldwide, including Lincoln Center, the Smithsonian Institution and the San Francisco Jazz Festival in the U.S.

“I like the pipa,” she says, “because it has very special sounds, ones other instruments cannot play, and because it can play songs that are both sad and happy. Not many Americans know about Chinese music. But here in the U.S., people really like the pipa. That feels so good. It’s very touching.”

Gao Hong has gained considerable renown as a composer for the pipa. She has received several important commissions and fellowships and has performed with symphony orchestras both here and abroad. She has premiered pipa concerti with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Heidelberg Philharmonic in Germany, the Portland (Maine) Symphony, the Women’s Philharmonic in San Francisco, and other ensembles. Hong also toured internationally with the Lincoln Center production of The Peony Pavilion.

Accompanying Gao Hong tonight is one of her partners in Spirit of Nature, master flutist Chen Tao. A former associate professor at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, Tao won the National Folk Instrument Competition in China in 1989. Known in China as “the King of the Flute,” he’s performed in Germany, Italy, France, England, The Netherlands, Finland, Hong Kong and the U.S. Praised as a “poet in music” by The New York Times, Tao plays a variety of traditional Chinese flutes--the dizi and the xiao, both made of bamboo, the bawu and the xun, a clay vessel flute that’s been around for 7,000 years. In addition to his concert work, Tao’s flute playing can be heard in numerous films, including Seven Years In Tibet, and on the PBS documentary Under The Red Flag.

Though Gao Hong and Chen Tao play in the larger group Spirit of Nature, they also do frequent duet appearances. Reviewing a duo concert in Milwaukee, a critic in The Courier-Journal wrote of “an extraordinary performance, rhythmically free, going beyond anything that could reasonably be called ‘technique’…stepping beyond the normal, formal bounds of ‘music’ into that raw aural region where instrumental sound and natural sound become one and the same.”

Gao Hong made her recording debut in 1996 with Hunting Eagles Catching Swans, a collaboration with her legendary teacher, Lin Shicheng. The album, which was well received in China, Europe and the U.S., was the culmination of an unprecedented tour in which the master and his star pupil--now a master herself--performed in Beijing, Honolulu, Seattle and several cities in Hong’s adopted home, Minnesota.

Her other albums include group recordings by the Beijing Trio (Buddhist Temple Music from Beijing), Speaking In Tongues (First Word) and the Spirit of Nature (Chinese Classical, Folk, Court, Minority, Silk & Bamboo Music). In 1998, she recorded "A Peacock Southeast Flew", a new concerto for pipa and orchestra, with the Moravian Philharmonic. Her most recent releases are Flying Dragon, which showcases her collaborating with a sitar player, a Japanese shakuhachi master and American jazz flutist James Newton, and Hui/Gathering Together, a collection of early music on which Gao Hong joins forces with the Baroque quartet Belladonna.

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November 2, 2003 -- La Bottine Souriante

It has been almost thirty years since a quintet of young Canadian musicians first got together to play some tunes. The five musicians' aim was to play the traditional music of the province of Quebec, specifically the Lanaudière region around their hometown of Joliette, an hour or so north of Montreal. And if they were going to be a proper band, they would need a proper band name. At some point, someone suggested La Bottine Souriante. Oui, tres bien, the others answered. It was the perfect name. Indeed--who could resist an outfit called The Smiling Boot?

La Bottine Souriante burst upon the French-Canadian music scene in 1976 and quickly became one of the most popular traditional Quebecois bands. The founding members of the group were André Marchand (guitar, vocals), Gilles Cantin (guitar, vocals), Mario Forest (harmonica, vocals), Yves Lambert (accordion, harmonica, vocals) and Pierre Laporte (fiddle), and the band was--at first--both traditional and acoustic. This was the group that recorded the band’s debut album in 1978, Y’a Ben du Changement.

The Lanaudière region that is home to the band has long been recognized for the richness and diversity of its traditional music and dance heritage. The area was first settled by French farmers, so the heart of the tradition is a vast body of French songs, les chansons, some dating back to medieval times. The French settlers were eventually joined by emigrants (and soldiers) from England, Ireland and Scotland, and the local style incorporated instrumental music and dances, such as the jig, reel and hornpipe, learned from these newcomers.

It was the band’s album Chic & Swell, released in 1983, that took the group "out of the cabin and usher[ed] them into the parlor," in André Marchand’s memorable phrase. The album contained mostly traditional material, but its more polished production and the band's increasing confidence hinted at things to come.

La Bottine Souriante was embraced by Celtic music audiences in the United States, who responded to the similarities between the band's multicultural sound and the more familiar instrumental music of Ireland. Tours in the U.S. followed, dramatically expanding the band's fan base outside of Canada. Subsequent tours in the U.K. and in Europe were highly successful, and La Bottine Souriante was soon a leading international act on the world music scene.

The band released three more critically acclaimed albums by the end of the 1980s: La Traversée de l'Atlantique, Tout Comme au Jour de l’An and Je Voudrais Changer d'Chapeau. The first of those albums paid tribute to the roots of Quebecois music in the United Kingdom and France. The second, a mixture of holiday songs and instrumentals, was recorded "live" at a party. The third album tipped its hand with its title, which translates roughly as "I want to change hats."

Je Voudrais Changer d'Chapeau changed hats all right. To their immense credit, the members of La Bottine Souriante have never viewed traditional music as static--as something that stopped growing at some point and became fixed in a particular time or style. Je Voudrais Changer d’Chapeau was the album on which the band began its journey from an acoustic, mostly traditional Quebecois dance band to the rip-snorting, free-wheeling, genre-smashing outfit that Dirty Linen called "the best band in the world" a few years ago. This was the album that added horns to the mix.

Horns? Yes, horns--trumpet, trombone, saxophone, those kinds of things. It's amazing what adding a few jazz-oriented horn players will do to the sound (and the energy) of a traditional string band. For starters, it opens up a whole new world of musical possibilities.

Without betraying or abandoning the band's roots in French, English, Irish and Scottish traditional music, the addition of the horn section--permanent since 1990--allowed La Bottine Souriante to flavor its musical gumbo with some new spices from around the world. The core sound is still there, but it's now seasoned with exciting bits and pieces borrowed from jazz, salsa, klezmer, ska, funk, Middle Eastern scales and New Orleans brass bands. There's a lot going on in this music, but it never sounds forced or contrived.

As a critic in Scotland wrote of the band's approach, "It's not just musical fusion, it’s organic integration. Soul preaching tenor saxophone picking up a fiddle line and running with it naturally. Nine voices engaging in a call-and-response exchange. Happy songs. Daft songs. Angry songs. Hangover songs. Trombone, trumpet, accordion, piano, mandolin, spoons, marching drum, and anything else that comes to hand…Jig and big-band jazz conspire in a joyous ferment" (The Herald).

The brass-augmented La Bottine Souriante was an immediate hit with fans around the world, though a few traditional purists were undoubtedly shocked by the move. The band toured extensively, performing throughout Canada, the U.S. and Europe, playing at major folk festivals, colleges, clubs and concert halls. The critics have loved the band from the beginning. Not far behind the Dirty Linen rave mentioned earlier, the English magazine Folk Roots has called La Bottine Souriante "the tightest and most exciting band of any nature, anywhere."

After witnessing a set at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland, a journalist was almost overcome by the experience. Writing in The Scotsman, he raved that La Bottine Souriante was "one of the most spectacular live acts around…a huge, brash and irresistibly syncopated juggernaut." Perhaps worried he had not made his point strongly enough, the writer added an apt description: "A great, thundering lollapalooza of sight and sound: folk band as kinetic theatre."

The band has also been quite successful as a recording act, with several Canadian gold and platinum albums and a handful of Juno Awards--the Canadian equivalent of the Grammy Awards--to show for it. La Bottine Souriante has recorded several albums since the change of hats. These include Jusqu'aux P'tites Heures, La Mistrine, perhaps the group's best-selling album, En Spectacle, a "live" album recorded in Quebec, Xième (known as Rock and Reel outside Canada), Anthologie, a "greatest hits" collection drawn from the band's earlier recordings and Cordial, the band’s most recent album.

La Bottine Souriante has weathered several personnel changes over the years, but the band has kept growing and evolving despite those challenges. The present-day incarnation of the band includes Jean Fréchette (saxophone, percussion, vocals), André Verreault (trombone), Jocelyn Lapointe (trumpet), Régent Archambault (acoustic and electric bass, vocals), André Brunet (fiddle, guitar, vocals), Pierre-Luc Dupuis (button accordion, harmonica, vocals), Eric Beaudry (electric footboard, guitar, mandolin, bouzouki, vocals), Robert Ellis (bass trombone) and Pierre Belisle (piano, piano accordion, percussion). Percussive dancer Sandy Silva completes La Bottine Souriante.

As satisfying as all the international fame and renown have been, home is still where the heart is for La Bottine Souriante. The band is an institution among French-speaking Canadians, hailed both as cultural ambassadors and the band to call for a guaranteed good time. Intensely loyal fans in Quebec have made their hometown heroes major stars with all the trappings of pop stardom--sold-out stadium concerts, music videos, the whole works.

Now, about that name, La Bottine Souriante. A "smiling boot," as it turns out, is a bit of local Quebecois slang for a worn-out work shoe. As the shoe gives in to its destiny, as the leather separates from the sole at the toe, it’s said to resemble a smile. This bit of ironic humor was appealing on two levels to the founding members of the band. First, it seemed an appropriate bit of cultural shorthand, identifying the band as one that played the traditional music of the French-Canadian working-class people. Second, what could better typify the dance band's bop-til-you-drop approach than a worn-out shoe?

Twenty-seven years and a dozen albums later, La Bottine Souriante is still rolling along playing its own unique brand of music, which BBC Radio 2 describes as "crazy, magnificent, full of energy and gloriously infectious." None of the five founding members is still with the band--Yves Lambert was the last to go--but the torch has been well passed.

La Bottine Souriante continues to rack up the frequent-flyer miles, continues to amaze audiences around the world, continues to win awards and continues to present the music of Quebec in an innovative, expansive and big-hearted manner. With a dynamic and thoroughly engaging stage show and an appeal that transcends language, cultural, generational, musical and national barriers, La Bottine Souriante is a rare find--a world music act that truly lives up to the name. Life is good for La Bottine Souriante. The boot is still smiling.

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October 1, 2003 -- Mamadou Diabate

When we Americans speak of “roots music,” we’re generally referring to music from the early to middle 20th century. It’s a bit different in western Africa, where such musicians as kora virtuoso Mamadou Diabate can trace their lineage, and their musical traditions, as far back as the 13th century. That depth of tradition, and the unique role music has played in African cultures, gives African music a resonance and social importance it lacks elsewhere. Music is more than mere entertainment there--it’s history, sociology, genealogy, literature, myth, spirituality and cultural identity all rolled into one tuneful, polyrhythmic package.

Mamadou Diabate was born in Kita, a city long known as a cultural center of the Manding people of West Africa. Mamadou’s father, Djelimory Diabate, was a respected kora player himself, performing in the Instrumental Ensemble of Mali. By the time he was four years old, Mamadou Diabate knew that playing the kora was his destiny.

Diabate was born into a “jeli” family. Jelis--often known abroad by the French word griot--are musical oral historians. More than just traditional musicians, the jelis use music, oratory and story-telling to preserve and celebrate their past, stretching back to the 13th century when the Manding king Sunjata (or Sundiata) Keita established the vast Empire of Mali. In the centuries before written language, these oral historians were vital in maintaining cultural unity and solidarity and were regarded as highly valued members of society.

Inspired by his father, Mamadou Diabate began playing the kora at an early age. The kora, a twenty-one string harp traditionally associated with hunters, so enthralled young Mamadou that, when his mother took away the instrument to force him to pay more attention to his school work, he simply made another kora from the materials at hand.

By his early teens, Mamadou had left school and was accompanying jeli singers at local weddings and baptisms, the primary ceremonial functions at which modern jelis perform. Mamadou won a regional kora competition at fifteen, becoming something of a local celebrity. The following year he moved to Mali’s capital Bamako to study with his cousin, the famous kora player Toumani Diabate. (It was Toumani who bestowed the nickname upon Mamadou he still carries: djelika djan, which means “tall jeli.”) Mamadou also backed singers, both on the wedding-baptism circuit and at the city’s hotels.

Mamadou had gained such renown as a kora player that in 1996, when he was still in his early twenties, he was invited to join a traveling company of the Instrumental Ensemble of Mali for an American tour. The tour was a success and Diabate decided to stay in the United States. He has lived in the New York area since then.

Mamadou Diabate has been a busy musician since moving to this country. He has performed at the United Nations in New York and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., as well as at music festivals from coast to coast. Diabate is also a frequent accompanist for visiting African musicians, adding his spectacular kora playing for concerts, tours and recordings.

If the name Diabate seems familiar to you, it should, as it is a leading name in world music. It’s perhaps the most distinguished family name in West African music, borne by a huge extended clan that encompasses many of the jelis. Another member of the family, the charismatic Abdoulaye Diabate, arguably the finest jeli singer living in this country, was a crowd favorite at this past summer’s CITYFOLK Festival.

As Mamadou Diabate says, “Today there are a lot of Diabates--coming from Mali, Senegal, Guinea, Cote d’Ivoire [the Ivory Coast] or Burkina Faso--on the top of the West African music scene. Sometimes it leads to confusion.” And sometimes it leads to confusion and great music, as it did at the March 2002 appearance by the Diabate Family Ensemble at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. That gala concert featured not only Mamadou Diabate, but also his celebrated kinfolk Cheick Hamala Diabate, Boubacar Diabate, Famorou Diabate and Broulaye Diabate.

For this concert at CITYFOLK, Mamadou will be joined by singer/dancer Adjaratou “Tapani” Demba, balafon player Balla Kouyate, and ngoni player Cheick Hamala Diabate.

Diabate made his recording debut with Tunga, released in 2000 by Alula Records, a world music label based in Seattle. Dirty Linen praised the CD, saying it “set a high standard, drawing on the richness of West African culture while reaching forward to explore new terrain.” RootsWorld hailed Diabate’s “sparkling technique” on the kora and his “flair for making this ancient instrument sound as though it was invented yesterday.”

Tunga (the word means “adventure”) is an appropriate title for Diabate’s album. Though rooted in the traditional music of Mali, Diabate is a world traveler who incorporates many different cultural strains and sounds into his music. He pushes jeli music into new territories, ignoring boundaries and barriers. The instrumentation on his album included the expected kora, balafon and ngoni, but also acoustic bass as well as electric bass guitar. The music itself is an original blend of traditional Malian music, American blues, Gambian kora music and other miscellaneous African styles.

Diabate’s debut album is an accurate reflection of his multi-faceted musical career. Since he has lived in New York, Diabate has collaborated with a diverse group of musicians, including jazz players Randy Weston and Donald Byrd and young blues singer and guitarist Guy Davis.

While listening to the music of Mamadou Diabate--or that of other musicians from Mali and the surrounding countries of Burkina Faso, Senegal, Guinea and Ghana--it doesn’t take too much imagination to start hearing the connections between this music and American blues. The linkage is especially evident in that style of blues that came out of the impoverished but musical area of northern Mississippi known as “the delta.” You can hear the connections in Mississippi musicians who never left the farm as well as in those who did, like John Lee Hooker, for just one example.

Musicians and scholars have talked about these musical similarities for years. It really shouldn’t be that surprising, as most of the Africans brought to this country as slaves came from this part of western Africa. Recent CDs have brought this idea more into the pop culture mainstream, most notably From Mali To Memphis, released a few years back on Putumayo. Using recordings by Malian musicians alongside cuts from blues singers Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Taj Mahal, Guy Davis and Jessie Mae Hemphill, the CD made a convincing case that the two musics were in fact two branches of the same family tree.

Mamadou Diabate has known this for a long time. The continuity between traditional Manding music and American blues was one of the themes on Diabate’s debut album and reviewers picked up on it. After mentioning From Mali To Memphis and other like-minded albums, The Beat noted that “none has made the connection as sublimely as Mamadou Diabate’s Tunga.”

The review continued: “The players weave their magic so tightly, it took a couple of listens to separate the rapid kora and ngoni exchanges. The group plays with the telepathy of a single large instrument. Virtuosity is taken for granted from a kora player named Diabate, but even more than his famous cousin Toumani, Mamadou gently pushes the edge with his beautiful, soulful precision.”

Mamadou Diabate says his father told him to listen to as many kora players as he could and to try to learn something from each one. He’s dutifully tried to follow that advice and not just with kora players but with all musicians. As a jeli--and a Diabate--he has one foot in the past and one foot in the present. As a musician, though, Mamadou Diabate has both eyes on the future.

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