AfroCubism
"The original idea for the Buena Vista Social Club"
AfroCubism
"The original idea for the Buena Vista Social Club"
AfroCubism will make their New York City debut on Tuesday, November 9 at 8:00 p.m. at New York's Town Hall, located at 123 West 43 Street. Tickets at $65, $50, and $35 are on sale now by calling Ticketmaster at 212-307-4100 or online at Ticketmaster.com Box Office sales begin on October 20 the Town Hall box office. This concert is co-presented by New Audiences, Absolutely Live Entertainment and boomBOOM presents.AfroCubism was record producer Nick Gold's original idea for the Buena Vista Social Club: a stellar collaboration of musicians from Mali and Cuba. 13 years ago, a tale of lost passports meant that the Africans never arrived and so instead, a rather fine but different record was made.
Now the original plan has finally been realized with an incredible group of musicians. Original invitees Cuban singer/guitarist Eliades Ochoa and the Malians Bassekou Kouyate (ngoni) and Djelimady Tounkara (electric guitar) are joined by Eliades' Grupo Patria, Toumani Diabate (kora), Kasse Mady Diabate (vocals) and Lasana Diabate (balafon).
This extraordinary band came together to record an album, to be released by Nonesuch/World Circuit in October, and in the process have created a wonderful new sound.
Line up :
Eliades Ochoa - Lead Guitar & Lead Vocal
Toumani Diabaté - Kora
Bassekou Kouyate - Ngoni
Djelimady Tounkara - Guitar
Kasse Mady Diabaté - Vocal
Lassana Diabaté - Balafon
Osnel Odit - Guitar
Jose A. Martinez - Double bass
Jorge Maturell - Congas & Bongos
Eglis Ochoa - Maracas
Lennis Lara - Trumpet
Alain A. Dragonit - Trumpet
Baba Sissoko - Tamani
ELIADES OCHOA guitar and vocals (born Songo le Maya, Cuba 1946) With his trademark cowboy hat and penchant for wearing black, Eliades Ochoa has been dubbed 'Cuba's Johnny Cash'. There's more than a fashion statement in the comparison to America's greatest country singer, too, for Ochoa is a 'guajiro' (from the countryside) and a champion of rural Cuban styles such as son and guararcha. He is today recognized as amongst the greatest exponents of Santiago style son.One of the younger members of the Buena Vista Social Club (and the first Cuban name on the original 'wants list' for the sessions that produced the original album), at 63 he's now become something of an elder statesman himself.
A decade after their first meeting, Ochoa and Segundo famously reunited to perform the song as the opening track on the Grammy-winning Buena Vista Social Club. To that album Eliades also contributed lead vocals on "El Cuarto de Tula," and his own guajira showcase on 'El Carretero'. Since Buena Vista, he has recorded several fine albums under his own name including Cubafrica (1998) with the great Cameroonian saxophonist Manu Dibango; Sublime Ilusión (1999); Tributo a Cuarteto Patria (2000) and Estoy Como Nunca (2002).
TOUMANI DIABATE kora (born Bamako, Mali 1965) One of the most significant musicians in Africa, Toumani Diabate is the leading exponent of the kora, the West African harp. He is a griot descended from a long family lineage of kora masters.
In addition to his mastery of Malian music's traditions he is an innovative and experimental collaborator. He recorded the two acclaimed Songhai fusion albums with the Spanish flamenco group Ketama and has worked with Damon Albarn, Bjork, and the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) amongst others. His collaboration with Taj Mahal on 1999's Kulanjan explored the connections between West African music and the blues and was cited by Barack Obama as his favorite album during the presidential election campaign.
In recent years, he has recorded a series releases for the World Circuit label, including two albums of kora-guitar duets with Ali Farka Toure, including the Grammy-winning In the Heart of the Moon (2004) and Ali and Toumani (2010); Boulevard de l'Indépendance (2005) with his groundbreaking Symmetric Orchestra; and the acoustic solo kora collection The Mandé Variations (2008).
BASSEKOU KOUYATE (ngoni, born Garana, Mali, 1966) Descended from a long line of griots, Bassekou Kouyate was born in the Segou region of Mali, where his mother was a famous singer and his father was a celebrated ngoni player. At the age of 16, Bassekou took his father's place and by the end of the 1980s he had joined Toumani Diabate's Symmetric Orchestra.
Since then he has revolutionized the playing of the ngoni, adding extra strings to give him a wider melodic range and inventing new plucking methods to allow faster runs and more versatility. He is today regarded as the instrument's greatest practitioner. As an accompanist, he went on to record with a wide variety of performers, including Youssou N'dour, Taj Mahal and Ali Farka Toure (including the latter's celebrated Savane), before forming the first ngoni band Ngoni Ba and making his debut as a band leader on Segu Blue, which won the 2007 BBC 3 award for world music as best album. He followed it in 2009 with a Sub Pop! Records release, I Speak Fula.
DJELIMADY TOUNKARA (electric guitar, born Kita, Mali, 1947) Arguably the finest guitarist in Mali, Djelimady Tounkara was born in the musical village of Kita and grew up playing drums and the xalam (lute). His parents wanted him to become an Islamic cleric but the plan was abandoned as soon as he saw and heard his first guitar. After early success playing in the Kita regional band, by the mid-1960s he had moved to Bamako, where he joined Misra Jazz on electric guitar before he was promoted to join the state-sponsored Orchestre National as rhythm guitarist. It was with this group that he travelled with Ali Farka Toure to the Sofia Festival in 1968.
After the Orchestra National was disbanded, he joined the now legendary Rail Band in 1972, playing at the Buffet Hotel de la Gare, next to Bamako's train station in a line-up that included the singers Salif Keita and Mory Kante.
With the Rail Band in it's glory days he mastered a great variety of styles including pop, Afro-Beat, funk, Afro-Cuban and Congolese rumba. Between 1977 and 1980 he moved to Abidjan in the Ivory Coast where he performed and recorded regularly. On his return to Bamako he led the successful Mandingo Trio before being invited in 1981 to rejoin The Rail Band (later renamed the Super Rail Band) as it's musical director and main soloist. Tounkara still fronts The Rail Band today and also leads his own acoustic band. In addition to appearing on the majority of the Rail Band's classic recordings, he has also released the solo acoustic albums, Sigui (2001) and Solon Kono (2006).
JOHN McLAUGHLIN AND THE 4th DIMENSION
On Saturday, November 13 at 8:00 pm John McLaughlin returns to New York's Town Hall.
John McLaughlin and the 4th Dimension includes:
Gary Husband on keyboards, Mark Mondesir on drums and Etienne M'Bappe on bass.Tickets: $65-$50-$35; available now at Ticketmaster 212-307-4100; online at Ticketmaster.com and at the Town Hall box office (123 West 43 Street). 212-840-2824, on October 22.
From Al DiMeola, Pat Metheny and Mike Stern to John Scofield, Bill Connors and Scott Henderson, John McLaughlin has been a strong influence on many of the top jazz/fusion guitarists of the last thirty years. McLaughlin's classic recordings of the 1970s have long been regarded as essential listening for anyone with even a casual interest in fusion. If the British improviser had decided to retire in 1980, he still would have gone down in history as one of jazz-rock's most influential axe men.
Born in Yorkshire, England on January 4, 1942, McLaughlin is well known for his eclectic taste in music. He was a child when he first fell in love with jazz and the blues, and he was just eleven years old when he began studying and playing the guitar. The 1960s found him playing jazz, rock, and blues in his native England, where he worked with Alexis Korner and Ginger Baker, among others, before moving to New York at the end of the decade.
McLaughlin had a very busy 1969: he recorded his debut album, Extrapolation, and started working with two seminal voices in early fusion: Tony Williams -- who employed McLaughlin and organist Larry Young in his trailblazing group Lifetime -- and Miles Davis. Never afraid to forge ahead, Davis had done a lot to popularize cool jazz and modal post-bop in the past-and he continued to break new ground when he introduced fusion on his 1969 sessions In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew, both of which feature McLaughlin's playing. The guitarist was also featured on 1970's A Tribute To Jack Johnson, another Davis gem of the time.
Like bebop in the 1940s and modal jazz in the early 1960s, fusion was controversial. Jazz purists felt that rock and funk rhythms had no place in jazz, but thankfully McLaughlin disagreed and let his musical instincts guide him. After participating in Davis' and Williams' groundbreaking fusion combos, McLaughlin founded an influential group of his own in 1971: The Mahavishnu Orchestra, which boasted such greats as drummer Billy Cobham and keyboardist Jan Hammer. By the time Mahavishnu broke up in 1975, they had recorded several classic albums for Columbia (including Birds of Fire, Between Nothingness and Eternity, and Visions of the Emerald Beyond) and gone down in history as one of the 1970's most influential fusion bands.
In 1975, McLaughlin did the unexpected by founding Shakti, an acoustic group that employed traditional Indian musicians (including tabla player Zakir Hussain and violinist L. Shankar, Ravi Shankar's nephew) and underscored the guitarist's interest in India's music, culture, and religion. Shakti reminded listeners that McLaughlin was as appealing on the acoustic guitar as he was on electric, and proved that he wasn't about to confine himself to playing any one style of music exclusively. Indeed, McLaughlin was heard in a variety of musical settings in the 1980s‹everything from a brief Mahavishnu Orchestra reunion in 1984 to an acoustic guitar summit with Al DiMeola and Paco de Lucia in 1982, to a classical album with the London Symphony Orchestra in 1988.
McLaughlin was no less eclectic in the 1990s, when his Verve projects ranged from 1993's acoustic Time Remembered: John McLaughlin Plays Bill Evans (a tribute to the late pianist) to sessions featuring organist Joey DeFrancesco (1993's Tokyo Live and 1994's John Coltrane-minded After the Rain) to an acoustic McLaughlin/DiMeola/de Lucia reunion in 1996. It was in 1997 that McLaughlin reunited with Zakir Hussain and a reconfigured version of Shakti for several U.K. concerts that were documented on Verve's two-CD set Remember Shakti.
On his latest recording, To The One, he features six original compositions which were mostly written in July and August of 2009. They were set down in the studio in November and December, with very few overdubs, by McLaughlin's current performing outfit, the 4th Dimension: Gary Husband (keyboards, drums), Etienne M'Bappe (electric bass), and Mark Mondesir (drums). Compositional devices clearly inspired by Coltrane are fused with elements of McLaughlin's own multi-faceted approach, all delivered with a group empathy and shared vision that harkens back to Coltrane's fearless mid - 60's quartet of Elvin Jones, McCoy Tyner, and Jimmy Garrison. The effect of Jones' kaleidoscopic approach to rhythm and drumming is especially felt, brilliantly recast and explored via McLaughlin's gift for complex metrical structures. "Even before I formed the Mahavishnu Orchestra," McLaughlin explains, referring to his now legendary exploratory outfit of the early-to-mid 1970s, "I have been fascinated by these rhythms and their challenges. To be able to improvise fluidly over a harmonic structure is freeing, but to do it over a complex rhythmic structure adds spice. Thankfully, I've had the chance to play with some of the most outstanding drummers in the world."
"I'm a guitar player‹that's what I am primarily, that's what I'll always be," McLaughlin has been quoted as saying. "(And) I'm an eternal learner. I don't want to stop learning because I feel that no matter what I've done, I'm really just beginning again. I don't think I'll ever stop learning."
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