By Geoffrey Himes
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 7, 2010; E04
Cotonou, an Atlantic port, is the largest city in the West African nation of Benin. It was there in the early '90s that a teenager named Lionel Loueke borrowed his brother's guitar and started playing in local dance bands. It wasn't easy. There were no accessible music schools or stores, so everything had to be learned by trial and error and by ear, usually from second-generation audio cassettes. And when one of his guitar strings broke, Loueke replaced it with a bicycle brake cable.
That early struggle was the beginning of a journey that brings Loueke's jazz trio to Blues Alley Monday night. It was a path that took him to schools in the Ivory Coast, Paris, Boston and California, won him jobs in bands led by Terence Blanchard and Herbie Hancock, and landed the guitarist a contract with Blue Note Records. Last December, Loueke got word that he'd received an unrestricted $50,000 United States Artists fellowship for the "caliber and impact" of his work.
Loueke's music is still rooted in his early days of continually rewound cassettes and bicycle-cable guitar strings. His new album, "Mwaliko," is brimming with African influences -- from Loueke's lilting crooning in his native Fon language to the rippling triplets of his guitar phrasing and the tongue clicks he adds to most numbers.
And yet the disc is equally defined by African American jazz -- from the substitute chords, elastic rhythms and unorthodox time signatures to the wild tangents of the improvised solos. The guitarist draws from both sources but refuses to be totally faithful to either. And that's what marks him as such an original.
"There's no need for me to play those traditional grooves from Africa the same way," he said by phone from his home in New Jersey. "We Africans know those grooves, but it's been done. It's the same thing in jazz. I may like bebop and Charlie Parker, but it's been done. Dizzy is dead, and the music has to go to a different place. You should learn some bebop, but you have to take it to another level. Bebop was a product of its time, but now it's a different time that needs a different music.
"The same is true of traditional African music. When I play in Africa today, they're surprised by what I'm doing, because it's not the same groove they're used to. It may still be highlife, but now it's in different meter or in a different harmony. They recognize where it's coming from but they've never heard where it's gone."
When Loueke played the New York Winter Jazz Festival in January, the towering, bald guitarist wore plastic glasses, a black pullover and faded jeans. Although the group was a trio, Loueke made it sound like a quintet by adding percussive tongue clicks and scat singing to his nylon-string guitar, Ferenc Nemeth's drums and Massimo Biolcati's bass.
On "Karibu," the title track of Loueke's 2008 album, the buoyant African melody was articulated by the guitar and scat syllables and the push-and-pull African pulse by the clicks and rhythm section. Before long, though, the tune and beat were spinning off into dizzying, improvised detours.
"I hear my voice as an extension of my instrument," Loueke said. "Sometimes I use words, but most of the time it's just sound. My voice helps me play the guitar better, because it teaches me to breathe by resting between my phrases. . . . When I'm singing and playing, sometimes it sounds like two different instruments, but most of the time it sounds like one, because everything is coming from my heart."
On "Mwaliko," Loueke is joined by two other jazz musicians who also sing scat syllables while playing instruments: Richard Bona of Cameroon and Esperanza Spalding of Portland, Ore. Loueke records two unaccompanied duets with each of these bassists, but the combination of two voices, guitar and bass, often moving independently, creates a large swirl of sound. The album also includes three numbers with Nemeth and Biolcati, who will back him at Blues Alley.
Two more unaccompanied duets feature Loueke with the biggest pop star in Benin, Angélique Kidjo, who will appear at George Washington Lisner Auditorium on March 27. That connection to his homeland is crucial.
"I'm glad I don't have to use bicycle cable anymore," Loueke said, "but when I listen back to the cassettes of my playing back then, I say, 'Man, that's cool. Why aren't I doing that today?' By studying harmony and jazz I learned many valuable things, but I lost my innocence, too. Now I'm doing my best to keep my essence even as I try new things. My goal is to absorb as much information as I can and then stop thinking about it."
Himes is a freelance writer.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/04/AR2010030405774.html
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