Kane Mathis in Brikama, Gambia with Malamini Jobarteh, his kora teacher of 15 years!

Kane Mathis has been off in Europe and Africa for much of the fall and so the Kora Band has been on somewhat of a hiatus, but we’re back for a gig this Saturday night in Seattle at a great house concert series in the Burien neighborhood.  If you’re in the area and would like to check it out you can email Lance at llh@lanceandlaurie.net for full info.  These fine people open up their house (which was specially constructed to also serve as a great place for live music) a few times a month for an ongoing series of concerts and we’re excited to be part of it!

We’re also gearing up for a nice year of activity in 2012 with some January concerts in Olympia and Portland (sans Chad unfortunately, who will be off galavanting around Europe again!), and then in Feb. and March in Seattle as we get ready for another west coast tour in April, and possibly another album in the works later in the year.

Time to write some new music!

- Wednesday, March 30 @ The Upstage in Port Townsend

- Thursday, March 31 @ Tula’s in Seattle

- Tuesday, April 5 @ “Notes from the Underground” at the Mission Theater in Portland

I guess this amounts to something of a “regional tour” though we get to go home every night, which is actually quite nice!  We have some new original tunes by myself for these shows as well as a version of the very old Mandinka classic “Djandjon” and the Ghanaian highlife hit “Mami Wata.”  Should be a great run of shows and maybe we’ll post some audio too, if it comes out well of course…

Anyhow, thanks again to everyone for their support and votes in the Golden Ear Award and stay tuned for more music, as always…Tunnel Six tour coming up in May…among other things!

As you are probably aware, one of my main musical interests these days is the combination of various musical traditions and influences in a non-superficial way (thus the Kora Band), and I was really excited when I found out about these guys several years ago from Kane, and then unexpectedly found them in Portland playing a double bill with the Blue Cranes at the White Eagle.  I later learned that both of them (Char and Robby, who are brothers, by the way) went to school with Rebecca Sanborn, the Cranes’ keyboardist, and then it all became clear!  I was really happy to discover a group that brings in some of my favorite world musics (African and Balkan, specifically) with amazing singing in English (!) and totally pulls it off without even a hint of new age corniness or any watered-down-ness that one may (mistakenly) expect from such a project.

I am very excited to be sharing the stage with them tomorrow evening, Kane and I are going to kick it off with another of our occasional kora/piano duo gigs, this time accompanied by Kevin as I mentioned above, on calabash, and possibly a bit of other percussion as well.  We’ve been working up our traditional repertoire as well as some cool arrangements on old and new Mandinka tunes and we hope that Robby from Round Mountain will join us occasionally on Djembe too.  Then Round Mountain will rock it, as always, so I hope everyone can make it out for what will surely be a special evening!

By the way, you can get a preview of Round Mountain here.  Enjoy!

Also, Alberta Street Public House is at 10th and Alberta in NE, and the show starts at 9:30.  Cool, I think that’s everything…

We just finished a couple weeks on the road in Washington, Oregon, and California touring the new album and had a great time as well as building audiences up and down the West Coast.  Our big CD release show will be this Friday night, the 24th at Jimmy Mak’s in Portland.  As with last time we played there, the excellent Blue Cranes will be opening.  They have also recently put out a new album and are sounding better than ever, and they will be joined by a string section for this one so it’ll really be a treat.  Reservations can be made at 503-295-6542 to ensure seating.

Here are a few links to various places you can get the new album.  I hope you enjoy it, we’re really proud of this one.  We reached #22 on the JazzWeek Radio Charts last week and we hope to keep up the momentum there as well!  You can find more info on the band as well as some photos from our tour, etc, etc at the Kora Band site: http://www.koraband.com

Purchase physical CD at OA2 Records

Purchase physical CD at Amazon

Download at Amazon

Download at iTunes

Although learning things by ear in this manner is not particularly exceptional in the grand scheme of things, I rarely have the opportunity in the jazz world to learn tunes  in this manner.  He proceeded starting from the guitar part and singing us each a line until we learned it.  Obviously this works especially well with short vamp-y tunes, but something about his inherent musicality really came through and it was a really gratifying experience.

I have been struggling in the Kora Band of late to figure out how to go about learning and arranging traditional tunes without over-arranging them and making huge, lengthy, and hard-to-read parts.  This was a great experience that made me wish I had as much rehearsal time with the kora band as I do with the Bantus!  Then we could learn everything by ear.  Oh well, hello I-5!

Anyhow, I just thought to post a little note about that as it was somewhat illuminating.  Now, back to making new charts for the Kora Band’s fall tour!  More on that forthcoming…

We’re just about to head into Two Sticks studio in Seattle to record our second album (our first, Just 4 U, came out in April of 09) with Don Gunn, our favorite engineer.  This one will be out in September on Origin Records, continuing my excellent relationship with them!

So, come out to Jimmy’s tomorrow night for this show if you’re in Portland, it’ll be a great one!  Reservations at 503-295-6542.

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.

The tune itself is pretty fun, I had been playing with Loveness Wesa and the Bantus Band for a bit when I wrote it, so there’s certainly some elements of the “Shona heartbeat” 4-on the floor, as it were.  I also wanted to explore A minor/C major on kora, which works well when tuned to the typically Malian “Sauta” tuning (basically F lydian).  And of course my interest in and love of the electric bass continues, despite the absolutist promises of my 12-year-old self, and Brady certainly slammed the weirdly difficult basslines I wrote him on this one.  Hope you enjoy!  Use the player below or click on the image to go directly to the Bandcamp page, where you can download it for free, or if you are so inclined, name your own price.

Oops, I digress.  Anyway, it was really a fantastic experience and I promise that the purpose of this post is not to make anyone jealous!  I do want to share some pictures and thoughts on the band and experience though.  Chad’s father is an avid collector of old signs and (get this) vintage gasoline pumps, and though the pictures we took don’t do it justice, check out this vintage Shell pump that adorns the living room! (Mark took this one while Kane was showing off his bizarrely awesome fusion drumming chops:)

Anyhow, besides the gas pump (or maybe including it), we had a nice little setup in the living room, where we found ourselves rehearsing up to five times a day (sometimes unwittingly: after dinner on Saturday night, we mysteriously started gravitating back towards our instruments.  “Are sitting at our instruments?” I found myself saying, and next thing we knew, we had come up with a great idea for our March 20 gig at Empty Sea Studios in Seattle, a great space focused on smaller acoustic groups.  We’re going to try something a bit different and do the whole show without drumset, in a more “intimate” and acoustic format.  Never fear, Mark will not be exiled, but will play only calabash and other percussion, and we’ll have Kane on kora and acoustic guitar, rather than electric.  It should be a cool evening, and a shift from our regular sound:

In addition to working up some of our old material in the more acoustic format, we learned a bunch of new songs, some of which we performed at our Hidmo gig on the 10th.  I’ve written a new tune (“Kora Tune #6″ for the time being) that I’m really proud of – I think it’s the best integration of my general musical aesthetic with some kora-specific material to date, and it really came to life in a sort of more epic way than I intended, which is always nice!  It’s been, and continues to be an interesting journey figuring out exactly what sort of things to do as a composer to work with the unique qualities of the kora.  On one hand, I don’t want to just sound like I’ve written some modern jazz and stuck a kora in it, but on the other hand I don’t want my own musical ideas to be completely overshadowed by the kora itself.  This tune feels like the right direction and I hope to have some more time to work on music during this brief hiatus (more on that in a minute).  We finally got the Rail Band’s tune “Maliyo” together, more or less – that’s one we’ve been trying to learn for 6 months but the deceptive beat placement continues to elude us!  One day we will rock it for sure.  Kane taught us a new tune “Amadou Sekou” by ear, which is always one of the best ways to learn anything of course, and the time afforded us on the retreat was great for that method of learning, which we usually don’t have time for, what with me living in Portland and the rest of the band in Seattle.  Chad brought in a tune by a German trumpeter, Volker Goetze, who has a great duo project with a Senegalese kora player, and of course, for good measure, we added another tune from the library of the great Franco, “Bolingo ya Moitie-Moitie.”  Watch for all of those tunes coming up in our spring gigs!

In addition to all that playing and eating, Kane brought his set of Mandinka drums and we worked on some traditional rhythms, which was really fun, though I felt a bit self-consciously white while doing so.  Nonetheless, I think it was really good for our general progression in hearing some complexities of African rhythms.  It was also very viscerally exciting, though quite loud (check out Chad and Brady in the background):

And, finally, we had some time to sit down and listen to some interesting recordings from West Africa, past and present (Kane brought a large portion of his unique CD collection, which was awesome).  I’ll leave you with a few more photos and a recording that I discovered on the retreat from Bembeya Jazz National, one of the foremost nationally sponsored bands of Guinea post-independence, which advertises the national airline, “Air Guinee”  Check out the awesome intro: “Security? Speed? Comfort? AIR GUINEE!!!” (click to listen)

Bembeya Jazz National – Air Guinee

And here’s Kane and I listening to it, in true African music nerd fashion:

(In doing further research on this, I discovered that Air Guinee lost their only jet plane (the others were all Russion turbo-props) in a botched takeoff in 2004 (long after this song was written, admittedly).  Fortunately no one was killed, but they just left the jet in the field where it crashed at Freetown airport in Sierra Leone, where it can be seen to this day!!)

In conclusion, we were very lucky to have the opportunity to go on our little retreat and we’re really excited for our upcoming gigs this year.  We hope to go into the studio in the late spring to record our second album and perhaps even embark on a short tour in the fall.  More on all that coming soon!  Meanwhile, here are some other classic moments from the weekend.  Chad and subsequently Brady are out of town until March, so we’ll be having a brief hiatus until then, but our spring is pretty full of gigs after that point.  One more note, I apologize for not having post-quality audio ready of any of the new material, but I will be sharing lots of that after we work it up a bit more in the spring.  Thanks for reading!