Kora Band Album #2 On The Way…
Posted on | April 27, 2010 | No Comments
Well the Tunnel Six tour is nearly upon us, after almost a full year of planning! However, before that epic adventure begins to unfold itself, I’m really looking forward to going into the studio with my Kora Band to make our second album! Just 4 U was a good one, but the band has changed and developed a lot since then and I’m excited to document it. Also, we’re going to be putting this one out on the ever-growing Origin Records out of Seattle, whose hard work is doing great things for all the artists on their roster, which we’re excited to join (and which I’ve just joined already with my new sextet record on their subsidiary label, OA2.
Anyway, the new Kora Band record is looking very promising: we’re going to be putting down (hopefully) definitive versions of some of our favorite tunes added to the book in the past year, including our hommage to Cuba, “Sinyaro,” our epic ancient tune, “Koulandjan,” and three (!) brand new compositions by me which exploit new possibilities in the band, particularly with kora tuning. I’m just starting to explore the other scales available with the kora’s two standard tunings of F major (silaba) and F lydian (sauta), and Kane’s prowess on the instrument once again comes into play as I am able to write things like the new tune “Cascades” in C major / A minor, and he can pull it off with great ease and virtuosity! I’ve also come up with a new one featuring Mark on calabash, which we’ve been exploring more recently since our first “all-acoustic” (i.e. no drumset, percussion only) show at Empty Sea Studios earlier in the year, a great show which we hope to present over there again in the fall. And, as I write this, I’ve just finished up one more new tune (Kora Tune #8) using a really freaky new kora tuning, an F lydian dominant scale (so, F lydian scale but with E-flats instead of E-naturals). The sound is sort of creepy and really awesome, as you can hear from our rehearsal last week:
Andrew and Chad freak out at the new kora tuning (click to listen)
We’re going into the studio on May 9-10, just after our fund-raising concert in Seattle on May 8 (more on that here if you’re interested), and our show with Ben Darwish at Jimmy Mak’s in Portland on May 7 opening for his EP release. Don Gunn, who is awesome, will be engineering, and we’re even going to have some special guests on this one, more on that soon.
Meanwhile, if anyone has suggestions for an album title, comment away! (or if you have anything else to say for that matter), and I’ll leave you for now with our recently recorded version of “Cascades”, which I discussed above, from March, and which we’ll be setting down a definitive version of on the new record.
Comments
Leave a Reply