Mandekan Cubano Project Delivers
The winter holidays’ emphasis on warmth and good will towards humankind means that musicians genuinely possessing those qualities bear the most desirable of gifts. As a New Yorker in constant search of musical substance, engagement and freshness, I’m thrilled that singer-songwriter-electric bassist Richard Bona debuts his Mandekan Cubano project at the Jazz Standard Dec. 27 through Jan. 1. This new sextet promises the seasonal message without the cloying sentiments or predictable set lists.
Richard Bona. Photo courtesy of the artist
A comingling of West African and Caribbean island sensibilities suggests heat and light, melody and rhythm, virtuosic performance with plenty of fellow feeling, and Bona is one Santa who can deliver. His ensemble—comprising Latin jazz specialists on trumpet and trombone, the Cuban Quintero brothers playing percussion and pianist Osmany Paredes—is designed to be flexible and spontaneous. The cross-cultural concept is not a stretch; as Bona says, “It’s all the same music. I don’t see any difference, actually.
“What we call Cuban music in the western world, to an African it’s not something strange. It’s African music. The clavé, the rhumba, all the rhythms are African. The beat is right there. It belongs to us. When you listen to bands from Africa and Cuba recorded in the ’50s, they have the same orchestration. Cuban music was really popular in Africa back then.”
Bona discovered this in retrospect. Born in 1967 in a small village in Cameroon to a griot family that encouraged his obvious talents, he arrived as a professional in America in 1995 by way of studies in Germany and France. His first gigs here were with fusioneers who dug his fluid, legato bass lines, reminiscent of the late Jaco Pastorius, one of his main influences. Bona toured with Joe Zawinul, the keyboardist-composer who’d brought Pastorius into Weather Report, and recorded with guitarist Mike Stern, Jaco’s buddy.
But Bona is not one to be limited or defined by style. Since Scenes from My Life, his first album (released in 1999), he’s issued eight more under his own name, each varied in focus. He’s also taken supporting roles in efforts as different as An Evening with Harry Belafonte and Friends, Pat Metheny’s group and Jazz Standards on Mars, featuring the Soldier String Quartet with avant-garde flutist Robert Dick.
All of Bona’s music highlights his gentle—but never wimpy!—touch, his welcoming if not enveloping lyrical voice and his self-effacing yet winning instrumental confidence. The Mandekan Cubano musicians have had only four rehearsals, but its leader says that from the start, “I’d play a rhythm and everybody else would jump right in. Nobody asked where the downbeat is, which shows how close our musics are. I’m singing some of the old Cuban songs, but in Fulfulde, not Spanish, and they sound beautiful. Even the language works.”
Bona will record the band while at The Standard. He plans to take it to European fests next summer, but we have it here, now. And on New Year’s Eve he has a special guest: guitarist Lionel Loueke, another boundaryless musician from Cameroon.
Reach Howard Mandel at jazzmandel@gmail.com.
