...This issue includes a nice article on guitarist Lionel Loueke.


Here's an excerpt.

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Lionel Loueke: African American
by Geoffrey Himes




In January, Lionel Loueke visited Joe’s Pub in Manhattan to preview the songs from his first major-label album, Karibu on Blue Note. Backed only by his longtime triomates, the guitarist sketched out the lilting melody of the title track on a nylon-string acoustic guitar, often shadowing the line with vowel-softened scatting and tongue-popping clicks. There was an echo of his native West Africa not just in the vocals (“karibu” means “welcome” in Swahili) but also in the push-and-pull, two-against-three rhythms. Before long, though, he and his bandmates pulled away from the theme into improvisations that diverted the melody, knotted the rhythm and expanded the harmony. In that pulling away, one could hear the centuries-long journey of African music into jazz synopsized in a seven-minute song.
Loueke’s biography offers a similar synopsis. Like the music itself, he too was born and raised in West Africa—in his case, Benin. He too got started participating in family and neighborhood rituals. He too visited Europe where he discovered how harmony could fit atop African melody and rhythm. He too crossed the Atlantic to transform that hybrid sound into an improvising art form. Unlike so many before him, though, Loueke made this journey not because he was compelled by slavery, poverty or politics, but out of an intellectual hunger, as if he sensed the potential in the music of his childhood that could only be unlocked by new tools and new experiments, as if he intuited that African music was a tree of many branches and could be truly grasped only by following its path out into the diaspora.

Later at Joe’s Pub, when Loueke reappeared through the red curtain onto the corner stage for his encore, he brought out a special, unannounced guest. It wasn’t Herbie Hancock or Wayne Shorter, the only two guests on Loueke’s new guitar-trio record. It was Angelique Kidjo, Benin’s most famous musician. They made an odd couple: The towering jazz guitarist wore a pink-and-blue striped shirt and a short braid at the back of an otherwise bald head, while the tiny pop singer wore a black leather skirt and jacket and a short, bright blonde afro. But when they began to perform, it was obvious that they had had similar childhoods in the same place.

http://jazztimes.com/colu...e_id=19009

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tA

Tribal Disorder

http://www.soundclick.com...dID=182431

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Going to grab it now...Thanks!!




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Man I just saw this at BORDERS, but grabbed the new TRAPS mag. It's got LENNY WHITE on the cover!!!

Marcus is on the cover of BASSPLAYER..>again!!!