Christmas Jazz 2014 Richard Bona Trio (USA-Camerun)

Singer-songwriter and one of th best bassplayers Richard Bona is like a sunshine and has been even named as one of the five world wonders of the turn of the century. Bona is like a born artist – elegant and skilled. His easy-going and light attitude, sincere music and stageshow are warming hearts in every corner of the world. The visitor of Jazzkaar festival could hear Bona for the first time in 2002. He was just wowing the crowd! This time it’s already the third time to meet with the Estonian audience – the favourites always come back!

Richard Bona comes from a tiny village in Cameroon, and now makes his home in the great cities and concert halls of the world. It wasn’t good luck that opened all these doors. At every turn, it was Bona’s outsized talent, intense concentration, and fierce determination that propelled him into an ever-expanding universe, beyond the confines of musical or cultural boundaries.

Today, Bona is a singer/songwriter, bass player, composer, bandleader, and digital and analog engineer/producer with a singular artistic vision. Behind these achievements lies a storybook life. Born in the village of Minta in 1967, Bona was a baby who cried all the time, and the family soon discovered that the one thing that calmed him was music. By the age of five he was playing the balafon (a wooden-slatted melodic percussion instrument) in his grandfather’s traditional music band. At eleven, his family moved to the capital city, Douala, where he became an in-demand dance band guitarist before discovering and quickly mastering the language of jazz—at just fourteen. Bona moved to Paris in 1989 and New York in 1995, establishing in these two cities a reputation as one of the most exciting jazz bass players on the planet. And all this before he began his solo recording career with Scenes from My Life in 1999. Now Bona’s seventh solo album, Bonafied, an intimate, mostly acoustic, multi-genre set of songs, offers personal stories, tributes, philosophy based in lifelong love of nature, and a spirit of musical adventurism that just won’t quit.

“I come from a different place, a place where music has to be describing a story,” says Bona. “When I was a kid, music was not music to us unless there was a beautiful story behind it. That’s my background. That’s still where I live. Even when people don’t understand the language, they can feel what’s happening. The sounds of the words and the music tell the story. And the stories of people’s lives are the same, work and love and struggle and happiness, all over the world.”
Richard Bona has played together with such great names as Michael ja Randy Brecker, Pat Metheny, Larry Coryell, Mike Stern, Steve Gadd, Herbie Hancock, David Sanborn, Paul Simon, Joe Zawinul, Harry Belafonte, Chaka Khan, Raul Midon and many others.
Homepage: http://www.bonamusic.com

Line-up:

Richard Bona – vocal, bass
Sylvain Luc – guitar
Ernesto Simpson – drums

 

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