Sounds quite interesting, I'll have to seek out some Lionel Loueke music. Larry Blumenfeld of the Wall Street Journal writes, in part:
If a film were made of guitarist Lionel Loueke's career to date, the master shot sequence would be his 2001 audition for admission into the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance, then housed at the University of Southern California. "He started playing rhythmic patterns and vocalizing off a tune's melody," recalled trumpeter Terence Blanchard, the program's artistic director, "and we were floored." Pianist Herbie Hancock and saxophonist Wayne Shorter were also members of the audition jury. "I turned to Wayne, just as he was turning to me," Mr. Hancock said. "We didn't even have to say it; we just knew: We're going to hear more from this guy."
[From For One Guitarist, Jazz Is an African Dialect - WSJ.com]
And we have. By the time Mr. Loueke, who is 35, arrived at Joe's Pub in Manhattan in March to celebrate the release of his new CD, "Karibu" (Blue Note), he'd earned a reputation as one to watch.
A little backstory:
Mr. Loueke's story begins in the city of Cotonou, in Benin, a small nation of roughly six million people tucked between Nigeria and Togo. His father was a mathematics professor; his mother, a high-school teacher. As a child, he soaked in everyday Beninese songs, with vocals accompanied by beats on hand drums and an occasional sanza (thumb-piano made from a gourd and metal strips). At age 17, he began playing a beat-up, borrowed guitar -- a far cry from the Godin electric with built-in synthesizer he now favors, or the hollow-body Yamaha on which he often taps out percussion.
When a friend brought him a George Benson album, he developed an ear for jazz. He left home on a scholarship to attend the National Institute of Art in Ivory Coast, where he learned to read and notate music, and, following that, the American School of Modern Music in Paris, whose jazz-savvy faculty is drawn largely from Boston's Berklee College of Music. Mr. Loueke earned a scholarship to Berklee, where he first encountered his future trio mates, Messrs. Biolcati and Nemeth.
Mr. Loueke's music is unmistakably jazz, in that it is harmonically sophisticated and flexibly swinging, informed by bebop and blues repertoire, and highly adaptive to each player's improvisations. Yet even in odd, extended meters, the music never sounds overly cerebral or complicated. Its rhythms are based on overlapping cycles, as in African music, which turn in easeful fashion. And even Mr. Loueke's furthest-flung solos are staked to simple melodies that float through nearly all his music, recalling, he says, the songs he heard as a child.
Mr. Loueke's previous recording (Obliqsound), combined trio studio sessions with recordings of percussionists he'd made in Benin. The new CD blends influences more organically. Mr. Loueke set Hoagy Carmichael's "Skylark" to a Central African groove; he inserted paper beneath his instrument's strings for one section of John Coltrane's "Naima" to mimic a thumb-piano. Mr. Hancock and Mr. Shorter play on two tracks each; one, "Light Dark," demonstrates the guitarist's comfortable role within one of jazz's closest and most productive dialogues. But the album's truest focus is the trio's interplay, especially the connection between Mr. Nemeth's light-touched rhythms and Mr. Loueke's delicately stated lines.
I'll let you know in a week or so if these recordings are as cool as Larry Blumenfeld makes them out to be.
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Jazz is a woman's tongue in your mouth.