I don't like to throw around the word "genius" because it feels cheap if you overuse it. I think in this instance it's warranted though. Richard Bona is a genius. I'm not the first person to use that title in association with him, and for good reason. Bona was born in Cameroon into poverty and built his own instruments out of whatever was laying around. When he was 11 he started teaching himself to play the guitar. By 13 he was playing Jazz clubs. By 22 he was building his reputation as a world-class bassist in the style of Jaco Pastorius alongside big names like Manu Dibango, Salif Keita, Jacques Higelin and Didier Lockwood. However, don't think his talent only lies in the electric bass. Bona's vocals are always stunning, and his talent extends to many different instruments like keyboards, percussion & drums, guitar & mandolin (and that's just this album). He now lives in New York, where he holds a professorship in music at New York University and continues to make awesome music.
Ten Shades of Blues has a very African flavour to it, but at the same time holds a great deal of variety in its sounds. The album itself was recorded in Mumbai and New York by a french-style jazz musician from Cameroon, so yeah, think about that. "Shiva Mantra" has a very Indian style to it, "African Cowboy" sounds exactly like what you'd think it would sound like (which is of course, awesome) and all the tracks simultaneously show his heritage as both an African musician and a French jazz musician. Perfect!
The hard part is picking which two tracks I'm going to link to YouTube. Hmmm. Just listen to all of them. They're all really good!
Esukudu:
M'Bemba Mama:
No comments:
Post a Comment