Karibu (Blue Note)
Lionel Loueke
Released March 24, 2008
JazzTimes Top 10 Albums of 2008
YouTube:
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=5uCpUQTjtl4&list=OLAK5uy_n_pO1Ww3DZsS3V4Imb-onIh_a0JLu5vmM
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/album/14jUEYDfveqF1orGM7pc48?si=TSP83SKJTtW-0BLY8K3BdQ
About:
Like many of today’s top jazz guitarists, Lionel Loueke now makes his home in New York City. But Loueke grew up in what he describes as a family of poor intellectuals in Benin, a small country of subsistence farmers in West Africa. And when he left West Africa to study jazz, he took with him the music of the region.
Loueke has since forged a unique sound, captured on a new CD called Karibu, his highest-profile release to date. Loueke recently brought his guitar to NPR’s New York bureau to demonstrate his original style with a solo performance. “I grew up listening to traditional music from Benin, and I was playing percussion, too, around 9 or 11 until 17, pretty much,” Loueke says. “My older brother was playing guitar, so I started playing guitar when I was 17… playing what we call African pop.”
But when a friend of his brother’s brought a George Benson album with him from Paris, Loueke’s musical interests and life started moving in a new direction. “I didn’t know what he was doing,” Loueke says of Benson. “I didn’t even know it was improvisation. All I knew was that it was something I would love to do.”
At age 16, Loueke went to study classical music history in Ivory Coast. He had so little money, he says, he got kicked out of his room for not paying the rent. Desperate for some kind of paying work, he went to a club, grabbed the band’s guitar while it was on break, and started to play. Before the band could grab it back, the manager offered him a gig. He held it for two years.
From Ivory Coast, Loueke went to study jazz in Paris, and then got a scholarship to the Berklee School of Music in Boston. After two years in Boston, he auditioned for a spot at the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz in Los Angeles, in front of jazz greats Wayne Shorter, Terence Blanchard, and Herbie Hancock.
“I flipped,” Hancock says on a video about Loueke. “I’d never heard any guitar player play anything close to what I was hearing from him. “The scope of the choices he made expressing himself,” Hancock adds. “It was as though there was no territory that was forbidden. He was fearless.”
Loueke’s unique sound fuses traditional African music with modern jazz harmonies, unique vocal inflections, and complex time signatures. Take, for example, “Madjigua,” an original composition which he performed alone in the studio. Before he started playing, he asked for some paper, which he threaded through his guitar strings near the bridge to get a buzzy sound.
The song sounds very traditional. But if you were having trouble following the groove, that’s because it’s in the exotic meter of 11 beats to a bar. When he’s not playing or traveling, Loueke practices often. He says that he and the rest of his trio, bassist Massimo Biolcati and drummer Ferenc Nemeth, can work together for many hours every day.
But all that work is paying off. Loueke’s great musical breadth and technical ability has resulted in a very busy schedule of guest appearances. Along with his own trio, he also plays in Herbie Hancock’s band. And he’s played with a who’s-who of big jazz names, not to mention African pop star Angelique Kidjo, a fellow Beninese New Yorker. “You know, every time I do a gig with different musicians, I learn something,” Loueke says. “I just want to be a musician, not a specific musician that can play only one style of [music].”
On his new album Karibu, his first for jazz label Blue Note, Loueke’s compositions grow from his African roots but quickly stretch and spread into complex guitar voicings, harmonies, and meters. The result, however, does not come off as a dry musical exercise. The songs feel like a fresh, organic amalgam of a well-traveled musical life, performed by someone who’s put in the time to become a master of his instrument.
Track Listing:
1. Karibu (Lionel Loueke) 6:50
2. Seven Teens (Lionel Loueke) 6:57
3. Skylark (Hoagy Carmichael / Johnny Mercer) 6:47
4. Zala (Lionel Loueke) 6:30
5. Naima (John Coltrane) 7:05
6. Benny’s Tune (Lionel Loueke) 6:08
7. Light Dark (Lionel Loueke) 10:10
8. Agbannon Blues (Lionel Loueke) 6:05
9. Nonvignon (Lionel Loueke) 5:41
Personnel:
Lionel Loueke: guitar, vocals
Massimo Biolcati: bass
Ferenc Nemeth: drums
Special Guests
Herbie Hancock: piano (2, 7)
Wayne Shorter: soprano saxophone (5, 7)
Recorded September 2007, at Bennett Studios, NJ
Producer: Eli Wolf
Recorded and Mixed by Joe Ferla
Mastering: Steve Fallone
Photography: Jimmy Katz
Art Direction: Amanda Wray
Review:
On their third album together (and first for Blue
Note), guitarist Lionel Loueke, who hails from Benin, West Africa, Hungarian
drummer Ferenc Nemeth and Swedish/Italian bassist Massimo Biolcati deliver a
set of exquisitely played songs that largely lay flat until guests Herbie
Hancock and Wayne Shorter inject some life into them. It’s not that the core
trio lacks talent-not by any means. Loueke’s lines are smartly formed and
deftly executed. His ear-friendly melodicism draws both from traditional
African sources and a lifetime of closely studying the likes of Jim Hall and George
Benson, and his rhythmic shifts come quickly and packed with surprises.
Biolcati especially is a proactive player, and Nemeth’s skipping, airy touch
injects the proceedings with a worldliness one would expect from such an
international cast.
But, agreeable as it all is, they never really
cook on their own. Loueke’s device of complementing his lead lines identically
with wordless vocalizing gets old fast, and although his solos are brisk and
colorful, his compositions are samey and lack spark. That all changes on the
tracks featuring Hancock and Shorter. Loueke virtually steps aside as Hancock
delivers his fiery solo on “Seven Teens,” bringing to it an element of edgy
flightiness; when, for the last two minutes, Hancock and Loueke engage in
conversation, the dialogue is elevated, and their intuitive split-second timing
makes one long for a full album by the pair. On Coltrane’s “Naima,” an opening
minute so quiet as to be nearly inaudible is jolted by Shorter’s soprano
saxophone, inspiring some of the most adventurous playing of the disc by Loueke
and co. And when both Shorter and Hancock spend 10 minutes with the trio on the
appropriately titled “Light-Dark,” they take the music places it’s begging to
go on the tracks they don’t endow.
Jeff Tamarkin (JazzTimes)
