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"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.
Jon Hartley Fox, a Dayton native now living
in California, has finished his first book, King
Of The Queen City: The Story of King Records,
to be published next year by the University of
Illinois Press. He has been writing about music,
pop culture and the arts for over thirty years.
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.”
back to top
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.”
back to top
March
13, 2004 -- Cathie Ryan
Singer
Cathie Ryan was born in Detroit,the
daughter of Irish immigrants. Despite being a
natural talent who took to singing as a child
the way a fish takes to swimming, Ryan never intended
to be a professional singer. Not really. It just
sort of happened.
It’s worked out pretty
well, though. After less than a decade as a
solo artist, Cathie Ryan has been called the
“Irish female vocalist of the decade”
(Irish American News) and “one
of the leading voices in Celtic music”
(Los Angeles Times). To a critic
in Pittsburgh,
she’s “the living embodiment of
deep Irish folk roots”; The
Irish Echo sees her as “a long-time jewel in the Irish music
crown.” The ultimate accolade may be that
Irish America Magazine
recently named her one of the “Top 100
Irish Americans.”
Though geographically distant,
Ireland
was a living presence in the Ryan home as Cathie
was growing up in Detroit.
The thrill of the new was always tempered by
what had been left behind. “It was a sad
time for them,” Ryan has said, “but
also exciting to be starting a new life. My
father got a job with General Motors, where
he worked for thirty years, but there was always
a missing piece, always longing for back home.
That longing colors my music.”
The Ryan family spent much
of its time at the local Gaelic League. Cathie’s
father had a fine tenor voice and his singing
was quite popular at the League. In that supportive
almost-family environment, Cathie started singing
in public well before she started school. She
sang at the League and at Irish-American Club
dances and was introduced to many styles of
traditional Irish music at a tender age.
Those lessons were augmented
and expanded on frequent trips to Ireland
to visit her grandparents, who had a huge impact
upon Ryan’s musical development as a singer
and songwriter. Her paternal grandmother, Catherine
Ryan, was a singer and fiddler, and her maternal
grandfather, Patrick Rice, was a skilled storyteller
who instilled in the young girl a love for Irish
history and mythology.
Grown up and married, Ryan
moved to New York
where she met singer Joe Heany. An immigrant
himself from County
Galway,
Heany was widely regarded as one of the best
singers in the world when it came to sean
nos, the traditional unaccompanied style
of Irish singing. Sean nos means “old style” in Gaelic and the a
cappella singing in Gaelic certainly sounds
old, with its long, involved melodies and highly
ornamented vocals.
"Sean nos
is an art that conceals its artfulness,”
says Ryan. “You sit in a chair and sing.”
The style is definitely not for every taste,
but for the true believers among us, there’s
nothing better. An American equivalent might
be the a cappella ballad singing
of such mountain singers as Ola Belle Reed,
Hazel Dickens or Ralph Stanley.
Ryan studied with Heany and
learned much about the Irish soul and traditional
singing from the master. “I appreciated
every minute I spent with Joe,” she says,
“singing and talking about songs. He brought
me further into the art of sean
nos, but mostly he gave me great encouragement
to sing. After spending time with him, I believed
I could and should sing.”
Blessed with a gorgeous mezzo-soprano
voice, Ryan began singing around New
York. She was singing
at a party in 1987 when flute player Joanie
Madden, the leader of the renowned group Cherish
the Ladies, asked Ryan if she might be interested
in joining the group as its lead singer. (In
sports terms, that would be like playing basketball
in your driveway and Shaquille O’Neal
stopping his car to ask if you’d like
to be the starting point guard for the Los Angeles
Lakers.)
Ryan was interested, and she
joined the all-woman band that would become
one of the most popular Irish music groups in
America.
As the lead singer of Cherish the Ladies--which
also included at the time Winifred Horan, Mary
Coogan and Maureen Doherty Macken, among others)--Ryan
toured and performed with the group for seven
years. She was prominently featured on two of
the group’s albums, The Back
Door and Out and About (both
on Green Linnet). The albums beautifully showcased
Ryan’s singing on material ranging from
traditional sean nos to her
own original songs. “The Back Door,”
her poignant song about Irish immigration, has
already attained the status of a standard in
modern Irish folk music.
By 1995, Ryan felt ready to
test the waters as a solo act and left Cherish
the Ladies. “It was a tough thing to strike
out on my own,” she says, “but it
has been the best thing for me as a singer,
as a writer and a person. I am free now to express
my own music. It’s been a very creative
and fulfilling time.”
Ryan has matured into an intelligent
and insightful songwriter, which she feels has
to do with her heritage. “The Irish soul
is always a little tortured,” she explains,
“and that’s where good writing comes
from--when you’re not sure of yourself
and you’re always questioning. Irish music
is full of real human feelings and longing.
There is a magnetic sadness to songs about losing
things important.”
This is especially true within
the Irish-American musical tradition, which
is, almost by definition, about loss, dislocation
and separation. As a songwriter, Ryan fits squarely
within this tradition with songs like
“Somewhere Along the Road,”
“The Back Door” and “Rathlin
Island
(1847).” The latter song (on her Somewhere
Along the Road album) was inspired by a
visit to the Irish island that served as a jumping
off point for thousands of immigrants sailing
to North America.
On the island, Ryan saw the
“writing stone” (Clogh
na Screeve), a mute reminder of the poor,
starving people who passed by on their way to
new lives. Before they boarded the ships, many
people carved their initials on the rock, knowing
in all likelihood they would never see Ireland
again. Of that visit, Ryan says, “Seeing
‘the writing stone,’ I was struck
not only by the heartache these people must
have felt, but also by their strong conviction
that ‘we will survive.’”
Ryan says that when Joe Heany
sang, “Ireland
just came out of his voice.” The same
could be said of Cathie Ryan. But if you listen
closely to her singing, there’s more than
just Ireland
in her voice, there’s America.
Growing up in Detroit,
many of her friends were from southern families
who listened to and played country, bluegrass
and mountain music. Young Cathie paid attention
when those records were playing--check out her
cover of Ola Belle Reed’s “High
on a Mountain” on Somewhere
Along the Road.
She was also deeply influenced
by the Motown music that was an inescapable
part of living in Detroit.
Motown soul colors her songwriting and singing
as well as her playing. When she gets a certain
rhythmic groove going on the bodhrán,
the skin-covered Irish drum she plays in concert,
you can almost hear the echoes of the great
Motown drummers Benny Benjamin, Pistol Allen
and Uriel Jones.
Since leaving Cherish the Ladies and
launching her solo career, Ryan has recorded
three critically acclaimed albums, all for the
Shanachie label: Cathie Ryan
(1997), The Music of What Happens
(1998) and Somewhere Along the Road
(2001). She has also been featured on more than
thirty compilations of Celtic music.
Ryan and her band have toured
extensively throughout the U.S.,
Canada
and the British Isles,
performing at venues ranging from tiny folk
clubs to huge music festivals. She has performed
numerous times on public and commercial television
in the U.S.
and also has many successful appearances to
her credit on the nationally aired public radio
programs Mountain Stage, Thistle
and Shamrock and The World.
In the U.K.,
Ryan has performed to enthusiastic acclaim on
both BBC Radio 2 and BBC Scotland.
Between her singing and her
songwriting, her albums and her concert performances,
Cathie Ryan has established herself as one of
the brightest lights in the modern Celtic music
movement. She straddles cultures deftly--appropriate
for the daughter of immigrants--making music
that honors both her heritage and her present.
This is a key part of her appeal, as a critic
for The Boston Globe astutely
noted: “Cathie Ryan builds a beautiful
bridge between Irish music and the contemporary
songwriter…She is a thrilling traditional
vocalist, but her honey-pure soprano is equally
at home on probing original ballads about a
woman’s place in the modern world…Her
singing is simply sublime.”
Cathie Ryan's singing and distinctive
percussion work on the bodhrán
is joined tonight by Sara
Milonovich on fiddle and keyboards and
Greg Anderson
on guitar and bouzouki. Ryan enjoys performing
and it shows in her compelling and captivating
live concerts. “There is nothing like
a live show,” she enthuses, “being
with an audience, sharing the music. That is
the best part of being a singer.”
back to top
February
13, 2004 -- Martin Hayes & Dennis Cahill
Seeing fiddler Martin Hayes
and guitarist Dennis Cahill in concert is
a singular experience. There they sit, just
the two of them, each hunched over in concentration.
Most tunes (medleys of tunes, actually) start
out slow and quiet, as if the two were playing
across a late-night kitchen table. The tunes
twist and turn, almost imperceptibly picking
up speed and intensity. A few minutes into
the medley, it hits you -- this is some of
the most moving and powerful music you've
ever heard. The tune, by now wild and fast,
ends, and the audience explodes, cheering,
roaring approval, not quite believing there
are only two musicians on stage.
The musical partnership of
Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill is one of the
most potent in modern memory. The two began
playing together in Chicago in the early 1980s,
first in an eclectic electric band called
Midnight Court, eventually in a more traditionally
oriented acoustic duet. The duo clicked from
the start, and word spread quickly of their
marvelous music and near-telepathic interplay.
"The duo skips the flash
of more familiar Celtic music," wrote a reviewer
in The New York Times, "in favor of
a sparser, more intuitive approach. Stripping
old jigs and reels to their essence, leaving
space between the notes for harmonics and
whispered blues notes...the two communed as
if they hardly realized anyone was listening."
Ceolas noted the tightness of the duet:
"Dennis Cahill was superb on guitar, and the
two were so in sync that it felt like one
person playing two instruments, so much did
they perform as a unit."
Martin Hayes was born in
County Clare, Ireland, the son of a celebrated
fiddler, P.J. Hayes. Martin was surrounded
by music in his youth and grew up playing
in his father's popular band, the Tulla Ceili
Band. Traditional Irish music was in Martin's
blood, but his friends and school mates found
the music old-fashioned, boring, square. That
led Hayes to an early artistic decision that
sealed his future.
"As long as I can remember,
the music was there," he says. "I could sing
the reels the way other kids could hum a Beatles
tune. Even before I could play I had all these
tunes in my head. There was a choice. It was
either pursue this unhip, uncool path of Irish
music or reject it and go with your peers
who regarded it as something very odd. What
happened was I rejected the people who rejected
the music. I just couldn't understand why
they didn't want to hear it."
So Martin Hayes made his
choice. It was the right one. His fiddling,
rooted in the stately and lyrical traditional
style of East Clare, quickly gained him attention
as one of the finest young musicians in Ireland.
Hayes won the All-Ireland fiddle championships
six times and his fiddling indeed stood out
from the pack. Where others added complexity
and ornamentation, Hayes did just the opposite.
As Folk Roots says of his playing,
"Martin Hayes pares Irish music down to its
bare soul to examine its emotional purity,
and then whips us on an entrancing trip of
unexpected leaps and turns."
Halfway around the world,
the Sydney Morning Herald states it
in even simpler terms: "He's just so much
better than anything you've ever seen before.
He redefines your concept of excellence and
reveals levels of beauty and artistry that
previously hadn't existed in your frame of
reference. That is the only way to describe
the experience of seeing and listening to
Martin Hayes. Once you have seen him, all
other Irish fiddle players become faint shadows."
Hayes gave in to wanderlust
and wound up in Chicago at the beginning of
the 1980s. He worked at construction sites
during the day and played music and partied
at night. Hayes was a musical mercenary, willing
to do any gig that would pay for the next
round of partying. It was a time of, as he
says, "abusing the music." Joining forces
with Cahill -- a Chicago native born to parents
from County Kerry -- in Midnight Court was
a step in the right direction, musically.
Still, it wasn't until Hayes made a conscious
decision to return to his musical roots that
he found fulfillment.
"I got so sick of playing
'Danny Boy' and 'Black Velvet Band,'" Hayes
recalls, "I decided to see if I could get
away with doing the stuff I wanted to do...I
had no idea if it would sell or anybody would
want to hear it...I was amazed that people
actually wanted to hear it now."
While the response to his
stripped-down back-to-basics music surprised
Hayes, it makes perfect sense. Much of modern
Celtic music -- modern music in general --
values style over substance, flash over depth,
image over reality. Mass audiences are programmed
for entertainment rather than engagement.
In such an environment, though, there is always
a fervent counter-audience hungry for the
real thing, those seeking honest music from
real people. Hayes' music connected with this
group in a big way.
Hayes recorded his first
album, Martin Hayes , in 1993. Recorded
with guitar and piano accompaniment, the album
presented a fine selection of Irish tunes
played with skill and soul. For his second
album, Hayes returned to County Clare and
recorded Under the Moon. In addition to his
two American sidemen, Hayes was joined on
this album by his father, P. J. Hayes, and
guitarist Steve Cooney.
Everything finally fell into
place when Hayes teamed up with Dennis Cahill.
A sensitive and inventive guitarist comfortable
in many styles, Cahill has practically redefined
the concept of "rhythm guitar" in this music
with his unconventional approach. Cahill's
playing is distinctive and highly refined
-- and stone perfect for the music of Martin
Hayes. Cahill leaves out as much as he plays,
and he just might be the all-time master of
knowing what to leave out. Besides working
with Hayes, Cahill has also performed or recorded
with such acclaimed fiddlers as Kevin Burke,
Liz Carroll and Eileen Ivers.
Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill
have found beauty in simplicity. "We go to
the core of the music and the tunes," explains
Hayes. "There is a tendency to embellish and
decorate before we know what we're decorating,
so I always work my way backwards first to
see what's there. It's like a door painted
with forty coats of paint. You just keep painting
it until you wonder what was there in the
first place and strip it down to the wood.
It might not need painting at all. And if
it does, then the painting must be a very
delicate operation."
One has to go back in time
several decades to find a violin-guitar duo
of such power, musicality, grace and originality.
It's a short list. There's Stephane Grappelli
and Django Reinhardt, European jazzers who
tore it up in the 1930s and 1940s, and their
American contemporaries, Joe Venuti and Eddie
Lang. After that, there's...who? The point
here is not so much to put Martin Hayes and
Dennis Cahill on a pedestal but more to place
their collaboration in a historical context
to better illustrate the rarity of their gift.
That gift is based on a shared
musical vision -- a desire to explore the
space and feelings inside the music. To do
that, they have gone back to the beginning
of the Irish sound and started fresh. "Between
them," wrote The Independent, "they
have deconstructed the material to create
a vast spacious soundscape, aching with the
celebration of centuries, soaring with the
slow-burning dynamics of modern classicists."
"Irish music is the expression
of the universal muse," Hayes has written.
"What gives it its unique character is that
this muse has been expressed through our unique
cultural milieu and ethos...Tradition in music
is a process in motion that is undergoing
constant change and refinement. It is a reflection
of people's lives...The music is many things.
It is dance music. It is music of community
and sharing. It is music to listen to, music
to remember by, and to express through."
To the chagrin of their fans
Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill have not recorded
nearly as much as their talents warrant. The
duo has recorded only two albums, Live
in Seattle and The Lonesome Touch.
Hayes and Cahill are currently at work on
their third album, which represents a fairly
major stylistic departure for the two as their
fiddle and guitar are augmented by such instruments
as viola, mandolin and acoustic bass guitar.
Both men are excited about taking their music
in a new direction.
"Tradition is not a static
thing," declares Hayes, who has thought and
written about this subject quite a bit. "There's
no point in history where people stopped and
said, 'That's it. No more evolution or development.'
Music evolves. It's an art form, a means of
expression, a journey of discovery, and when
you take that out of the equation and require
people to simply repeat the past -- that's
when things start to die. The music cannot
stand still. That's a fact."
back to top
February 7, 2004 -- Les Yeux Noirs
In a world filled with
misunderstood and persecuted peoples and cultures,
the Gypsies are among the most misunderstood.
Even their origins are somewhat shrouded in
mystery. Early Europeans thought the Gypsies
were from Egypt, the source of the name that
has stuck despite its inaccuracy. In fact,
the Gypsies (or more properly, the Roma) originated
in northern India, but the Roma have been
on the move for so long, their true home is
the road.
The music of the Roma is
a record of their travels. The Roma first
left India at the beginning of the 11th century,
moving west into Turkey. It's now thought
the Roma were mercenaries hired to fight Islamic
invaders bent on conquering India. The Roma
must have been effective warriors, as they
always seemed to be moving forward. The Roma
(and their music) continued westward, as ordered
in times of war or persecution, as they chose
otherwise.
From Turkey, the road went
through Greece and Macedonia, across northern
Africa, the Middle East, Spain, and ultimately
into Russia and Eastern Europe -- such countries
as Romania, Hungary, Transylvania, Bulgaria
and Albania. At each step along the way, Roma
musicians interacted with local musicians
and incorporated elements of local musical
traditions that suited them. As a result of
those wide-ranging travels, modern Roma musicians
have an extraordinarily broad musical palette
at their command, a sensibility that combines
bits and pieces drawn from dozens of regional
and ethnic traditional styles.
Such is the musical heritage
and approach of Les Yeux Noirs, an eclectic
six-man band based in Paris. The sextet was
founded in the early 1990s in Paris by violin-playing
brothers, Eric and Olivier Slabiak.
The Slabiak brothers, born into a musical
family of Jewish emigres from Poland, started
playing violin at a young age and both received
a rigorous classical training.
Their parents hoped the boys
would become concert violinists, and studies
and competition victories by both at the Brussels
Royal Conservatory of Music seemed to herald
a bright future on the concert stage. But
then the brothers became obsessed with Gypsy
music and the Yiddish folk music they heard
from their grandparents.
The Judaism of the Slabiak
brothers, and their corresponding interest
in Yiddish folklore and the klezmer bands
of Eastern Europe, adds a fascinating layer
of musical, cultural and political context
to the Slabiak's immersion in Gypsy music.
Jews and Gypsies would seem to be worlds apart,
and in some respects, the two groups could
hardly be more dissimilar. In one unfortunate
regard, however, the two groups share a similarly
depressing history.
For far too many centuries,
Jews and the Roma have shared an "otherness"
that has led to discrimination, persecution,
violence and in the worst cases, genocide.
No matter the time or the place, these two
groups have been cultural outsiders at odds
with the dominant majority. Both groups were
targeted by Hitler for extermination and both
suffered terribly during the Holocaust. And
still it continues -- anti-Semitism is again
on the rise in Europe, while the collapse
of the Soviet Union has re-exposed the Roma
to ancient hatreds in Eastern Europe.
Given the above, one might
reasonably expect a fusion of Roma and Jewish
music to be suffused with melancholy, to possess
an unbearable sense of sadness proportionate
to the suffering of the two groups across
the centuries. Just don't expect that of Les
Yeux Noirs, a soul-affirming band that celebrates
life with a spectacular verve and gusto, as
if each new day is justification enough to
rear back and just let it rip.
"We don't have a message
about the tragic history of the Jewish and
Gypsy people," Eric Slabiak has explained.
"To play this music in the 21st century is
itself the message. This music survives like
the people. The character of these people
is very intense and dramatic, and one reason
the Gypsy and Jewish people exist today is
that they never give in to sadness."
So Eric and Olivier Slabiak
set out to try to merge the musical traditions
of their Jewish heritage with the Gypsy music
they had discovered -- and to try to perform
this musical fusion with the energy, dynamics
and power of the rock music they had also
recently discovered. Les Yeux Noirs began
its life as an acoustic band playing mostly
traditional material. As the band has grown
in sophistication, original material has entered
the group's repertoire and the band's sound
has considerably expanded.
The current edition of Les
Yeux Noirs -- Eric Slabiak (violin);
Pascal Rondeau (guitar); Olivier
Slabiak (violin); Gheorghe Ene,
who goes by the name of Ionica (accordion);
Franck Anastasio (electric bass); and
Francois Perchat (cello) -- includes
some members who are Roma by birth, while
others, like the Slabiaks, are Roma by choice.
Rondeau and Perchat, both born in France,
studied classical music at a young age and
later, again like the Slabiaks, became enchanted
by traditional Yiddish and Gypsy music. Anastasio
was born in Montreuil, the "Gypsy quarter"
of Paris, into a Sicilian family and grew
up playing music with Roma and Russian musicians.
Ionica, who began playing the accordion at
age four, was born to a family of Romanian
Roma.
The unique stylistic fusion
achieved by Les Yeux Noirs is a zesty and
spicy musical goulash that's hard to describe,
though its individual ingredients can be identified.
Most of the group members sing and the songs'
lyrics alternate between French, Russian,
Yiddish and Rom. Those songs range from slow,
mournful Yiddish folk laments to manic violin
and guitar rave-ups. There is plenty of dance
music in the mix -- czardas, sirdas, horas,
freylekhs, coceks, and all sorts of others.
There is a hearty dash of what might best
be called Baltic blues.
A final and extremely vital
part of the band's sound is its mastery of
Manouche, or French Gypsy jazz. The patron
saint of Manouche is the legendary jazz guitarist
Django Reinhardt, himself a Belgian Gypsy.
Reinhardt's classic recordings from the 1930s
and 1940s, many of which also featured violinist
Stephane Grappelli, are an important touchstone
for modern Roma musicians. They have definitely
influenced the members of Les Yeux Noirs,
in many ways -- the band's name, French for
"the black eyes," comes from the title of
a Russian Gypsy song made famous in the 1930s
by Reinhardt.
Music critics in France were
the first to shout the praises of Les Yeux
Noirs. Le Nouvel Observateur praised
the sextet for "breathing new life and energy"
into its fusion of Gypsy and klezmer styles.
Le Monde called them "a group of Gypsy
musicians with incredible energy, with roots
not only firmly planted in traditional music,
but also a lot of jazz. Les Yeux Noirs will
keep you on the edge of your seat."
As the band began playing
outside France and especially after it began
recording, the international world music press
picked up on Les Yeux Noirs. Some commentators
were more astute than others -- the Bangkok
Post, for example, gushed about "the boy
band of a lost era" -- but most of the reviews
were knowledgeable and complimentary.
The Philadelphia City
Paper wrote that the band's "eclectic
fusion is hypnotic and irresistibly sensual…Their
music ultimately suggests the shared histories
of Gypsies and Jews, bittersweet as the Slabiak
brothers' violins." The San Francisco Chronicle
liked the "rapid-fire picking and swinging
sensibility," while the Los Angeles Times
hailed the band as "immensely entertaining"
and "filled with enough high-voltage drive
to trigger exuberant responses from the crowd."
Recordings by Les Yeux Noirs
can be hard to find in these parts, but they're
worth the effort. The band's discography includes
Suites (first released in 1996 and
reissued in 2003); A Band of Gypsies
(1999); Balamouk (2002); and Live
(2003). Balamouk, for those who might be wondering,
means "house of the insane" in Romanian. All
of the albums are entertaining, but Live,
according to The Washington Post, "with
18 tracks drawn from all their albums and
all their styles, is the best possible introduction
to Les Yeux Noirs…What makes it all
work is superb technique, a sure grasp of
each style and a passion that obviously connects
with the responsive audience."
That connection is no accident.
"We came up in a family where music and traditions
were very important," says Eric Slabiak. "We
learned the tenderness of the music and the
humor of the culture. When we became teenagers
our ears were opened by pop and rock music.
It was very natural for us to make a combination
between our culture and all the music we love.
We find the same energy in Gypsy and Yiddish
music as in pop, rock and jazz."
And don't worry about connecting
with a band that sings in languages you don't
even understand. It doesn't matter, as Les
Yeux Noirs transcends the limitations of human
communication. "Music is our language, our
passport," explains Olivier Slabiak, "and
we can pass on the same vibrations, the same
emotions with our own language and be understood
by everybody in the world. Music is the real
Esperanto."
back to top
January
31, 2004 -- Jane Bunnett & Spirits
of Havana
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."
back to top
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.
back to top
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.
back to top
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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