Jazz has become a global language. Jazz With an Accent ®, the radio program and the blog, explores the many ways musicians around the world have reimagined their traditions with the tools, strategies, and history of jazz — and vice versa.
This Thursday, we will listen to jazz with an African accent.
We’ll open with guitarist Lionel Loueke, from Benin. We’ll hear “Rossignol,” a track featuring singer Gretchen Parlato, from his album Virgin Forest. And we’ll follow that with “Bona Petit” by Cameroonian multi-instrumentalist and singer Richard Bona.
What we’ll hear tonight is an organic mix of a world of influences. At some point, to pick at the sources is to miss the whole. The lives of the artists we’ll hear tonight have been defined by their search for a vocabulary to tell their whole story. Loueke moved to Ivory Coast to study at the National Institute of Art, and from there to the American School of Music in Paris, Berklee College of Music in Boston, and the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz (formerly the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz) in Los Angeles. Bona moved to Germany to study music and then to Paris, where he played with African stars such as Manu Dibango and Salif Keita. In 1995, he settled in New York (he has lived, at least part-time, in Miami Beach. Welcome to the neighborhood, Mr. Bona) and connected with artists such as Joe Zawinul, Pat Metheny, and Harry Belafonte.
Jazz With an Accent 