Here is another chance to catch Bombino once again in New York. He will be performing at Brooklyn Bowl on July 30, 2013 along with Janka Nabay, The Bubu Gang and Mamarazzi.
Bombino
Tuareg guitarist and
singer Omara "Bombino" Moctar has recorded a new album with producer
Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys, which will be released in early 2013 on Nonesuch
Records. Bombino and his band traveled to Nashville over the summer to record
in Auerbach's Easy Eye Sound in Nashville. Further details about the album and
its release will be announced shortly, as will upcoming festival and tour
dates.
Born and raised in Niger, in and around the northern city of Agadez, Bombino is
a member of the Tuareg Ifoghas tribe, a nomadic people descended from the
Berbers of North Africa; for centuries they have fought against colonialism and
the imposition of strict Islamic rule.
The Tuareg people have fought the Niger government to secure their rights on
numerous occasions, causing Bombino and his family to flee several times.
During one such exile, relatives visiting from the front lines of the rebellion
left behind a guitar and Bombino began teaching himself to play it. He
eventually studied with the renowned Tuareg guitarist Haja Bebe, who asked him
to join his band, where he acquired the nickname Bombino—a variation on the
Italian word for "little child."
While living in Algeria and Libya in his teen years, Bombino's friends played
him videos of Jimi Hendrix and Mark Knopfler, among others, which they watched
over and over in an effort to master their licks. Bombino worked regularly as a
musician and also as a herder in the desert near Tripoli, spending many hours
alone watching the animals and practicing his guitar. Eventually, Bombino
returned to Niger, where he continued to play with a number of local bands. As
his legend grew, a Spanish documentary film crew helped Bombino record his
first album, Group Bombino's Guitars from Agadez Vol. 2, which became a local
radio hit.
In 2009, Bombino met filmmaker Ron Wyman, who had heard a cassette of Bombino's
music while traveling near Agadez. Wyman was enchanted by Bombino's music and
spent a year seeking him out, eventually tracking him down to Ouagadougou,
Burkina Faso, where he was in exile after two band members were killed in a
rebellion. (The Tuaregs have since put down their arms and returned to Niger.)
Wyman featured Bombino in a documentary he was filming about the Tuareg and
also produced his 2011 solo album, Agadez.
NPR Music says Bombino's Agadez had "some of the most sublime guitar licks
you'll hear in 2011. The songs ... combine the best traits of Saturday nights
and Sunday mornings, mixing killer solos with delicate repetition. The most
magical moments come when Bombino finishes a verse—all sung in the Tuareg
language of Tamasheq—and begins to lose himself in his guitar. You can't help
but follow him down."
Janka Nabay and the Bubu Gang
Janka Nabay is the undisputed king of bubu, a frantically-paced dance music with ancient, magical origins in Sierra Leone. The Bubu Gang are the posse of musical collaborators he has hooked up with in the US (featuring members of Skeletons and Gang Gang Dance among others), to create a wild, high-octane juggernaut of call-and-response vocal interplay, juddering dancefloor rhythms, synths and guitars: throw in a taste for tearaway improvisation and you have an absolute blast of a sound, that keeps it quick, loose and natural and runs on pure musical joy. Ready to hit hard and true in full band format at festivals worldwide in 2012. An EP drops on True Panther Sounds in March before a full-length album on David Byrne’s Luaka Bop label later in the year.
Janka single-handedly radicalised bubu in his native Freetown, Sierra Leone in
the nineties, adding drum machine kicks and twitching synths to its airy hum of
blown bamboo shoots and carburetor pipes. Then he relocated to Philadelphia,
and after a decade off the musical radar he found a Stateside vessel for his
infectious music in True Panther Sounds, who released a well-received EP in
2010. This caught the well-tuned ears of the mostly Brooklyn-based players who
would go on to make up the Bubu Gang, namely Doug Shaw (Gang Gang Dance,
Highlife, White Magic), Jason McMahon & Jonathan Leland (Skeletons),
Michael Gallope (Starring) and vocalist Boshra Al-Saadi (Saadi): a series of
sweatbox US shows followed, and all involved realized they had birthed
something beyond the sum of its parts: “We speak one language now”, says Janka
of these exciting new sounds, that draw as much from Janka’s own bubu as they
do from the sunny energy of Ghanaian highlife, the extended improvisations of
70s Miles Davis, the hypnotic rhythms of classic Afro-beat and the swirling echoes
of 60s and 70s psychedelia.
Mamarazzi
"Spontaneously combusting in summer '06 under the careless scientific supervision of a group of Wesleyan University Alum (the nonsensical institution that housed Santogold, MGMT, and Dar Williams), the band's sound has been born and born again through daily revivals of its earthly ingredients…
The result, like a ripe grapefruit, is that just-right combination of unlikely elements: tart funk, acidic groove, and nectar of ancient lullaby."-SB
Members of mamarazzi have toured and/or performed with Questlove, Fred Wesley,
Pee Wee Ellis, Roy Hargrove, Vieux Farka Toure, Toumani Diabate, Wyclef Gordon,
and many other luminary artists.